My dog just doesn't get my fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage

I am about to present a rather substantive quote from the February 20, 2009, issue of THE WEEK, a magazine among whose charter subscribers I am proud to number myself. I'd also like to attest, wholly voluntarily and free of compensation, to the accuracy of the ambitious claim made by THE WEEK's masthead:

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

I provide this up-front endorsement as a preemptive measure, because I have not obtained THE WEEK's permission to reproduce the passage below, and am hoping no one there will get pissed off with me once they see how heavily I'm trying to promote the rag gratis.

Now to the substantive quote:

It's hardly Star Trek, but scientists have taken one small step toward the process of teleportation, says The New York Times. Utilizing the almost-magical properties of quantum physics, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland were able to transport information instantly across several feet of space, from one atom to another. With a microwave pulse, scientists "wrote" quantum information onto one atom. They induced both atoms to become "entangled." Entanglement is a mind-boggling quantum phenomenon in which two bits of matter somehow instantly affect the other across space, as if they shared a single identity. After the entanglement, the second atom had the same information that was written on the first atom, even though no information had traveled between them.

Did you get that "entanglement" business? Me neither. Stuff like that is why theoretical physicists and logicians go bonkers at a disproportionate rate.

Now, a lot of people think I'm Godless. They just don't know me well enough to know I'm not. Sure, maybe everything, including Darwinian evolution, got rolling with the Big Bang; but I firmly believe something or someone had to have been swinging the granddaddy of all mallets that day, and it's perfectly fine by me if we call the swinger "God."

But the gnawing thing for me about God is, I'm not sure the human brain is ever going to develop enough to fully understand what he or she or it had or has in mind. Not when a mind of that grandeur can whip up concepts like "entanglement" as a warm-up for the complex stuff.

In truth, I think the ultimate truths about God and the universe will probably forever elude human grasp. They'll remain as inherently and intractably incomprehensible to our pea brains as "30," "year," and "mortgage" will to my dog's.

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Them superbugs have to eat too

We watch as the lioness crushes the wildebeest's windpipe with casually lethal proficiency. We watch as her pride-mates shred its still-trembling flesh and drink from a gaping trough in the steaming carcass.

But...

The narrator admonishes us not to judge Nature's ways in the light of human sensibilities. Nature does not favor the lion over the antelope. Each performs its assigned role in the indifferently brutal pageant of existence, contributing equally to the delicate balance on which continuity depends.

Lions kill, or die from not killing. And in culling the weak, the old, the infirm, they help to ensure that the wildebeests, along with every other species upon which lions prey, will produce succeeding generations from only the fittest stock. They, the lions, are doing Nature's essential work.

Which brings me to one of the problems I have with prayer.

Because if lions are doing essential work, so too must insidious microbes be doing essential work. Insidious microbes must kill to survive, must kill to obey the mandate to cull.

The wildebeest prays, "Please, God, don't let these lions crush my windpipe and consume my pitiful, tick-ridden body." Much as we pray, "Please, God, don't let these Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus lunch all the life out of li'l old me."

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Gloria

A poem about my mother ...

If self awareness was
original sin then
what of that woman
who bore me
now?

Has she
(gone witless)
reversed God’s ire,
restored Eve to prefall purity,
regained Eden’s pristine clarity
in the insolent fluorescent haze
of Hilltop Haven?

Is scabrous skin thus
flawless flesh,
and hideous breath
the saccharine suspiration
of surpliced seraphim

who with bent heads and
barren gazes
glorify Almighty God
in hymns of unpremeditated
shrieking?

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Are we the best God can do? and other incredulous musings

How can God be perfect and still have made us? Would it have killed God to wire us not to publicly opine about or privately obsess over, say, Jessica Simpson's freshly acquired beef? Or was God shooting for silly in addition to rashly irrational? Who knows: Maybe the point of evolution was simply to bring us from baboon to buffoon. If so, mission accomplished. We are one sorry-ass collection of illogical, stubbornly (in some cases proudly) ignorant, and largely unable to meaningfully prioritize (e.g., beef-beefing) idiots.

Also ...

How come God needs to be worshiped, not to mention feared? Do you demand to be worshiped by your children? Do you boast about your dad-fearing or your mom-fearing, as the case may be, kids? Isn't God supposed to be the ultimate parent, not the ultimate pathologically insecure, stroke me, stroke me, stroke me, tyrant?

And how come so many Christians seem to place more stock in what's in the Old Testament than what's in the New? Didn't Christ redefine the definitive point of view (rhyme intentional)?

• Love thy neighbor as thyself (gotta love gays then, y'all).
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
• Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, et cetera.

I guess what it comes down to is, the New Testament just does not provide the comfy foundation of scriptural say-so for all the bigotry, intolerance, money-grubbing, backbiting, and back stabbing that are so woefully prevalent in so many self-described Christian lives.

So ...

Forget the faith, methinks. Just gimme the begorrah.

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