My beautiful deathbed conversion

Wide awake at four o’clock this morning trying to read myself back to sleep by reading about people who, wide awake at four o’clock in the morning, heard the voice of God calling to them.

One of them doesn’t think the voice he heard was God’s, exactly.  He believes it was the voice of “the mind” of the universe.  It’s the mind we all share in.  It’s what the the “mind” speaking to us in our heads draws its voice from.  I think he means something like Emerson’s Over-soul.  But it might as well be God.

The other didn’t hear an actual voice speaking but he believes God was calling him nevertheless. 

The first person is a fairly ordinary guy, except that he has spent nearly forty-five years thinking about what the voice said to him and what it means and what he and everybody else is supposed to do about it.  The voice made him a philosopher.  Although he never pursued formal training or held a teaching position and in fact continued at his job as a brick mason until he retired, over the years he has donated what extra money he has been able to spare to funding university-sponsored essay contests in which entrants are asked to answer the big questions about life, the universe, and everything.

The second is a scientist.  Not just a scientist.  This scientist.  Dr Collins had been struggling with---or against---a dawning religious conversion when God spoke to him.

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance.  As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over.  The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. 

God had called on him to become an Evangelical Christian.

Obviously, and not incidentally, God did not call upon him to give up being a scientist.  He went on with his chosen career and not as one of those quack scientists oil company apologists in Congress call upon to “debunk” global warming or creationists trot out to support intelligent design.  Collins is a creationist’s nightmare, an Evangelical who believes that evolution happens to be how God did it.

Both these men’s stories are versions of one of my nightmares.

I am terrified that some night---or early morning---I will wake up hearing the voice of God and that I will listen to it.

I don’t believe in God anymore.  That anymore is the key part of that statement.  Giving up my belief hasn’t made me feel smarter.  It’s made me feel robbed.  I miss it.  I can still feel it sometimes too, the way an amputee can still feel a missing limb or a grieving person will feel the company of a loved one or friend who has died.  But when I try to stand on it or reach out to embrace it, it vanishes and that leaves me sad and frustrated and…lonely.

It also leaves me feeling relieved.

See, much as I miss it, I don’t want it back because I don’t, well, believe that if I start believing again I will actually believe.  I’m convinced that if my belief returns it will only be a desperate subconscious attempt to fool myself into believing so that I have a defense against fear, despair, sadness, or loneliness or all of the above. 

In other words, I’m scared that I will believe because I’m scared.

Consequently, I’m on guard all the time against any thoughts that might indicate I’m starting to believe again.  This means that if God ever does decide to talk to me, he’s going to have his work cut out for him.

There’s not much of a point to this post, but it does let me tell one of my favorite anecdotes.

I had a friend, an English professor and poet, who was as unapologetic an atheist as an atheist can be.  One of his favorite things to say, which he usually said after hearing of some good, kind, noble, or decent thing someone had done, was, “Too bad there’s no such place as heaven.”

One day he pulled this in front a of a colleague, another poet who was not only a believer, but as unapologetic a believer as a believer can be.  He was also a touch flamboyant and had a way of delivering the simplest statements in such a grand, gushing, and utterly charming manner that you wanted him to be right even if he was in effect calling you an ass just for the aesthetic beauty of it.  And when my friend delivered his favorite line, the poet threw him a great big beatific smile and said, “Oh, Jim, you are going to have such a beautiful deathbed conversion!”

Jim threw a book at him.

I hope it was one of the second poet’s own books.

Anyway, that’s my fear for the day, a beautiful deathbed conversion.

This morning, though, at four o’clock, the only voices I heard were the birds’.  They were beautiful in their own right and God kept his majesty out of it.

____________________

Apparently, Collins causes fits in atheists too.

By the way, the book I was reading didn’t help me go back to sleep because it’s too interesting:  The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer.  I’m going to be reviewing it here within the next week or so.  Next up for review, though, is T.C. Boyle’s newest novel, When the Killing's Done.  Not that I’m assigning homework.

Oh, and in case you missed it, Friday I reviewed Boneheads: My Search for T. Rex by Richard Polsky.

Comments

[Mark]

The only reason I miss having a god around is that now there's no one to blame.

[muddy]

When I stopped believing it was a relief. Before that I thought God must be a real asshole, going by the evidence of my eyes and ears. Better no god than that one.

Btw, Lance, did the projector work?

[actor212]

Lance,

This is how I know there is a God.

From my own photography, I understand the nature and physics of light, colour, reflection and refraction. You've seen my photos, so you know what I mean.

I see a rose, and I photograph it employing science and technology, physics, engineering and computer chips. The rose was grown after generations of biologic and genetic manipulation, with agricultural science thrown in for good measure. I stand at this precise spot because I know which angle the light is coming from and I prefer to include this proportion in the picture. I set a shutter speed, aperture and ISO in order to find the most precise translation of the idea in my head.

Science provides the pmechanics, but only God can provide the beauty. That's my gospel, and all I need to know about the world to know that there must be a God.

[Sherri]

I don't know there is a God. I gave up the belief of my childhood, because the God of my childhood wasn't a God I could believe in. But at some point, I chose to have faith again. For me, it's not about heaven (don't know if it exists, don't really care), and it's not a defense against fear. It is a defense against loneliness and despair, and having been in the depths of severe depression, I decided that I could use all the defenses I could find against both. So I choose to have faith. I don't believe that God will protect me from anything, but I choose to have faith that I won't have to be alone, even if I feel alone.

I don't have to answer any of the big theological questions. I just choose to have faith that I'm not alone. You can argue that it's not real; I'd argue that as long as I choose to have faith in it, it's real enough.

[food doctor]

Holy week Blogging, Gotta love it! Every religion is right and every religion is wrong. One galaxy with a billion planets. A billion galaxies to surround our tiny galaxy. The human brain can not understand God as the brain of a smaller animal on our planet can't understand a human being.God created everything and is watching.My money is on God and let it roll... Enjoy the show and let me know how it ends, or begins for that matter!

[Rebecca Clayton]

Two points:

1. It amazes me that Francis Collins has been successful at NIH AND openly Christian. I worked on the fringes of NIH during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, and being "out of the Christian closet" was about as dangerous to one's career as being out of the gay closet would have been at the Pentagon. It was OK to be Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist because that was assumed to be embracing one's ethnicity rather than believing in God.

Collins is a really nice human being (I met him a couple of times, briefly) and a successful political creature. Also, he's from here in Appalachia, and taken all together, this is not the typical CV of your high-ranking government scientist. He's no theologian, and I don't necessarily agree with him, but I really admire him for saying what he thinks on a taboo subject.

2. Why is it bad to believe something that makes you feel better? Is feeling good a sure sign that something is not true? Would it be OK to believe in God if you're sure he's going to throw you in the burning pit of Hell because of something you can't help? I'm not trying to be a wisegal, I'm just wonderin', since you brought it up.

[scribbler50]

Since I believe God is in ALL things you did hear His voice this morning... it was in those birds.

[velvet goldmine]

Food Doctor, Your analogy captures it for me. Depending on our belief systems, we may be like ants comically denying the presence of the very humans who are watching them in an ant farm, or, alternatively like ants comically believing that the scarecrow in the field will prevent home base from being washed out in the next flood. Or we may be like ants who believe in something greater...and are right.

A contemporary version of this Twilight Zone idea, albeit with slugs instead of ants.

http://www.hungermtn.org/slug/

[Lance Mannion]

Rebecca Clayton: Why is it bad to believe something that makes you feel better? Is feeling good a sure sign that something is not true?

Not at all. But I don't want to believe just to feel better. I don't want to get religion as an opiate of the Mannion. It's probably neurotic of me, but at this point I'd rather not believe than believe but be worried all the time that I was simply kidding myself.

That's interesting about the culture at the NIH, and disappointing.

fooddoc, that sounds like an invitation to come back to haunt you when I'm gone. I'm cool with that, as long as you promise that when my ghost wakes you up for a chat at four in the morning you'll offer to make coffee.

[Lance Mannion]

muddy, I've been meaning to write you. The projector has been on a long, strange journey. It's finishing up another leg this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes.

[food doctor]

it'll have to be decafe i need my rest