Resident Skeptic – ETHICS

James R. Cowles

© Copyright James R. Cowles 2021

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 Ethics

Chapter 1 – Knowledge, Power, and Responsibility, the Eternal Golden

Braid
As I have said before, when I was taking both secular philosophy (ethics at a secular university)
and moral theology (at a Jesuit school, Seattle University), I was taught, in different ways and in
different dialects, that Knowledge plus Power equals Responsibility. I.e., if I know that a given
situation is morally wrong and if I have the power to effect change, then I am morally
responsible for acting so as to alter the situation and right the wrong. And, moreover, the degree
of responsibility varies directly with the scope of my knowledge and my power to effect that
change. E.g., there is not much I can do to alleviate the plight of Syrian refugees. Maybe all I can
do is to give money. But I am obligated to do at least that much. Given how widespread the
teaching is that Power plus Knowledge equals Responsibility, therefore, it is passing strange to
me, and has been for many years, how reluctant religious people are – I am speaking now of
adherents of monotheistic religions, i.e., ethical monotheisms -- to apply this principle
consistently to their own theologies. If indeed Power plus Knowledge equals Responsibility,
what are we to make of God’s responsibility, assuming we accept the orthodox doctrines about
the Character of God as possessing infinite Power and infinite Knowledge? There is such a thing
as “intellectual courage,” and that is one quality that seems conspicuously absent with many
(most?) monotheistic believers today.

Two examples will illustrate what I mean. The first such is the issue of the sexual abuse by
Catholic – but not only Catholic – clergy in the Christian church. (I say “not only Catholic” to
make room for allegations of sexual abuse by arch-Protestants like Bill Gothard and proven
instances of sex trafficking by, e.g., Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.) I have written extensively
about this scandal, and related scandals vis a vis the relationship of Knowledge and Power to
Responsibility, e.g., the Sandy Hook shootings, in previous “Skeptic’s Collection” columns.
There is scant point in rehearsing all that now. If you are interested and want to refresh your
memory, I would invite you to Bing / Google up previous "Skeptic's" columns on those subjects.

The reason I am resurrecting – so to speak – these issues now is because it has recently come to
public notice that (a) Catholic clergy have been abusing, not only minor children, but adult
women, primarily nuns, for some indefinite period of time; and (b) the episcopal leadership of
the Church has, not surprisingly, intensely persecuted gay clergy. These reports hone to an even-
sharper edge the whole question of the relationship between Knowledge and Power, on the one
hand, and Responsibility, on the other. And I am speaking now of this issue from a purely,
exclusively theological perspective.

Consequently, I want to make two points clear at the outset:

• I have no personal axe to grind with the Catholic Church.

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I was converted and received into the Catholic Church on Trinity Sunday of 1982. The Church
came into my life when I was languishing in the fetid backwaters of, first, Christian
fundamentalism and, later, non-fundamentalist but still fundamentalist-adjacent far-right
evangelicalism, and had finally given up going to church -- any church -- at all for a few years.
Thanks to visiting St. Anne's Catholic Church in Wichita, KS, Catholic teaching came to me
with refreshing, bracing, and in my case, arguably life-saving, clarity. Catholic Christianity
granted me freedom to think. The abuse crisis notwithstanding, I still admire it and am grateful
to it for that reason alone. Furthermore, the priests I have known, which is several dozen over the
years, have without exception been men of conspicuous intelligence, compassion, pastoral
sensitivity, good humor, and insight. Never, at any time, have I ever in any way or in any sense
been abused by any priest. All the priests I have known have without exception been deeply
human, flawed as we all are, but no more so than I. I do not doubt that experiences of abuse are
real. But I have never been a victim.

• I do not profess to have the answer to the Knowledge / Power vs. Responsibility
conundrum.

My intent here is not to traffic in answers, but rather to simply emphasize the question. (I
confess that, in past "Skeptic's" columns, I have likely been premature in proposing, or at least
implying, answers instead of just concentrating on the question. Mea culpa.) In particular, I
would like to know – you “Skeptic’s” readers may consider this an opinion-poll question – why
no one is asking the question about the relationship between Knowledge / Power and
Responsibility with respect to the Character of God?

The relationship between Knowledge / Power, on the one hand, and Responsibility, on the other,
has so far attracted only significant attention within the community of Jewish theologians, in
particular, theologians of the Shoah. (I probably overstated the case earlier when I said
categorically that no monotheistic believers were asking such questions.) As examples, I give
you Jewish "protest" theologians like Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, David Blumenthal,
et al. Among Christian theologians, one of the few who address the question of what Prof.
Blumenthal calls the “abusing God” is Phyllis Trible, whose Texts of Terror faces squarely the
issue of Divine abuse. But, as far as I know, she is an exception, not the rule. It would seem that,
whatever scant attention is being paid to the issue of Knowledge / Power vs. Responsibility has,
at least so far, been confined to academia, at least among Christians – and vanishingly few of
even them. And – granted, I could be wrong, in which case, I apologize -- but I know of no
attention at all being paid to the issue among Muslim scholars. At least among Christian
intellectuals, the issue of Knowledge / Power and Responsibility seems to be like one of those
little short-lived streams in, e.g., Death Valley that trickle for a few meters, then, sinking into the
sand, is forever lost from sight.

When the issue of the relationship between Knowledge / Power vs. Responsibility is raised
among Christians, the discussion inevitably concentrates on the "mechanics" of running the
Church, the character of the Church as an institution, the methodology the Church uses in
screening seminary and ministerial candidates -- and what seems to be the perennial red herring
of the episcopal leadership: the relationship between homosexuality and the abuse of minor

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children in the Church -- though the leadership is cricket-chirping silent on the relationship
between gay priests and the abuse of women religious.

But the issue is much broader than the "mechanics" of Church governance. Important as that
issue is, I would submit that even that is not the most salient issue. Rather, the most salient issue
is: why and how can it be that Christians in the Church continue to swear fealty to and faith in a
God Who, despite being possessed of infinite Power and infinite Knowledge is nevertheless held
not to be responsible for failing in the care of even the most vulnerable within the Church? What
sustains faith when, time and again, the media carry horrific stories of the ministers of God, not
once but again and again over decades, preying upon the most innocent and defenseless? Unlike
Jewish "protest" theologians of the Shoah like, e.g., Prof. David Blumenthal, who do not hesitate
to call God to account, even to the point of describing God as "abusive," Christian theologians,
almost without exception, stop at the "horizontal" dimension of the abuse scandal without so
much as even asking the "vertical" question -- which is all I am doing here -- of God's
complicity.

Scandalous and defamatory -- even blasphemous -- as it sounds, perhaps Christians need to

consider the possibility that the real questions surfaced by the sexual scandals in the Church
pertain, not to the character of the Church, important as those indisputably are, but to the
Character of God.

As I said earlier, I do not know the answer to that question, and so no longer traffic in answers.
Rather, I would conclude with one more question, arguably even more un-ask-able than the first:
could it be that the continued solace and comfort many people derive from a belief in God is
more important to them than even the safety of children?

What price comfort?

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Chapter 2 – Uncle Sigmund Learns About “The Return of the Repressed”
Would a couple of you please carry Uncle Sigmund’s luggage? (I’d do it myself, but this damn
sciatica has laid me low for over three years now. OK … good … thanks … ) And, Uncle, please
be careful of that first step down from the train. Remember, you’re not as young as you used to
be. We have a lot to talk about, now that you’ve returned. On the way to your hotel, we can
discuss some topics I’m sure you’ll be very interested in, specifically Donald Trump, Brexit, and
the fabled sexual peccadilloes of conservative American televangelists. I have a feeling the
world is finally catching up with you. What’s that you say, Uncle? All three phenomena are
actually the same, like the heads of Hydra all belonging to a single monster? Fascinating. I guess
this is a case of great minds thinking alike, or at least, a case of one great mind, yours, thinking
like one mediocre mind, mine! So … yes … let’s explore that.

As I understand it, Uncle, you asserted that human beings regularly engage in the practice of
repressing into the unconscious mind a whole spectrum of anti-social, lustful, disruptive, and
even outright pathological impulses and desires that, were they consciously pursued and acted
out, would make life in anything like a civilized, coherent community impossible. As one might
expect coming from you, you argued that a great many of these impulses were sexual in nature,
and not a few were associated with issues clustering around Oedipus and Elektra complexes
centered on one’s clandestine sexual desire for one’s opposite-sex parent. More generally, these
repressed desires and impulses were particular expressions of an overarching “pleasure
principle,” i.e., the repressed desire to pursue one’s own gratification to the exclusion of any
considerations that might be loosely termed “social” or “altruistic”. To the extent that such
patterns can be summarized in a single motto, a good rule-of-thumb description might be taken
from a recent exhortation by TV's preeminent exotic-foods gourmet, Andrew Zimmern … umm
… someone has told you about TV, right, Uncle? … ah! … splendid! … who says “If it looks
good, eat it!”. Except that the updated version would be something like “If it feels good, do it!”

But the other side of the coin -- do I have this right so far, Uncle? -- is that, precisely because
these impulses are anti-social, disruptive, and inconsistent with life in civilized society, they are
interdicted by a whole complex network of taboos, prohibitions, sanctions, and penalties
involving ostracism, sometimes even direct criminal prosecution, that force us to, not only
repress them, but also to reject acknowledging them by our conscious minds. As you noted in
Civilization and Its Discontents, "civilization is bought at the price of inhibitions", a point you
repeated in the first of your Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. We pretend these impulses
are not there, and then even repress the pretense of pretending. We not only forget, we also
forget the very act of forgetting. These orphaned and unacknowledged impulses and desires are
like stars and planets and gas-clouds that fall past the event horizon of a galaxy's black hole and
that consequently get sucked into the singularity at the center. With one major
difference. Unlike material that falls into a galactic black hole, the tabooed materials --
desires, thoughts, impulses, etc. -- that fall into the black hole of the human id can return,
in fact, quite often do return. (Your contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of this in his The
Gay Science as the "eternal return".) Sometimes, as you wrote of in 1901, Uncle, in your
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, as mere quirks -- slips of the tongue, errors in writing,
infelicitous metaphors -- and sometimes and in extreme cases as grotesque prejudices and even
insensate violence. So perhaps a better analogy would be an unstable, pre-supernova star instead

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of a black hole. (I realize, Uncle, that you don't know what these things are. We have discovered
a lot in the hundred years or so you've been away. I've enclosed several "executive summaries"
and a reading list inside the envelope holding the Seattle tourist brochures.) With both an
unstable star and the human id, an enormous amount of energy is held inside a very compressed
space. If and when that energy escapes, it will occasionally do so with a degree of violence that
at times can scarcely be imagined, wreaking vengeance on whatever agency -- gravity or cultural
taboos -- that once confined it.

As you may have already read in, e.g., the NY Times and the Seattle Times, we Americans have
been going through something like this with the candidacy of Donald Trump. I realize you are
probably not terribly conversant with American politics. That's OK. Neither are most
Americans. And they haven't even spent the last century in Vienna. But on the other hand, you
may be more conversant that you realize. You can, in fact, think, in classically Freudian terms,
of Donald J. Trump as the particularized, incarnate personification of your concept of the id ...
except that Trump is an id with no ego ... and certainly with no superego. I myself have written
about this before -- even using your terminology, Uncle -- from the standpoint of Trump's
supporters. But Trump is also a psychoanalytic phenomenon, in that, as the id incarnate, he
provides a channel or an avenue -- probably more like a Santa Monica Freeway -- that facilitates
the return of our long-suppressed animus against people who are, in the broadest possible sense,
"not like us".

But beyond even that, Trump is a cautionary tale in what can happen to a society when the
inequities, injustices, frustrations, and disappointments of a whole "underclass" of people are
continually, habitually, reflexively -- and at this point, even institutionally -- ignored,
neglected, and suppressed by the dominant, political, social, and economic elites. There is a
whole substratum of American society -- in the inner cities (at least, the parts that remain un-
gentrified), in the tattered remnants of the middle class, in the disenfranchised who yearn for
change but who are repeatedly frustrated by the political-party establishments, in those who feel
denigrated by the academic and economic elites, etc. -- that has been repressed for a generation-
plus by the overlying echelons of power and privilege. And that long-repressed substratum is
now returning. At times with a vengeance. Because of his prominence as a political candidate
and his reputation -- I think vastly over-inflated -- as a successful businessman, Trump, teaching
by example, gives his followers blanket permission to give voice and even overt action to all
those suppressed, interdicted, and taboo-laden impulses, attitudes, and desires that the dominant
society has treated with such genteel disdain and contempt. The dominant society seems to have
made the fatal error of allowing itself to be seduced into believing that, because those impulses
were repressed, that they therefore had ceased to ceased to exist. And we are now in the process
of discovering that, like all repressive acts, repression does not mean annihilation, merely an
abdication of conscious control.

But I believe Americans should be of good cheer. Our European siblings have committed the
same fallacy, so we are in excellent company. European fears of immigrants, cultural
"mongrelization," and economic decline -- in large measure as a result of immigration into the
EU from the Levant -- have combined with the EU's designedly porous borders to form a
veritable autobahn for the release of previously repressed anger, resentment, resistance, and
xenophobia, on the part of Europe's middle classes, that Europe's own versions of Donald Trump

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-- Nigel Farage in the UK, Marine LePen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, et al. --
have used as leverage to begin to push toward a reversion back to a more nation-centric Europe
of the 1950s with rigorously enforced borders, competing interests, and -- in the end -- perhaps
the kind of interlocking, intra-European alliances that eventuated in two world wars in 30 years.
Given the havoc wreaked upon the world for at least 150 years by a Europe comprising a few-
dozen pristinely sovereign nations, one has to wonder if a Europe whose economy is run from
Brussels, however heavy-handedly, is really not preferable to the traditional model of Europe-as-
abattoir. As a victim of anti-Jewish prejudice in late-19th-century Vienna, Uncle, you -- and
certainly your father -- are no doubt more thoroughly schooled than I in such considerations.
Except that now, the previously repressed impulses being acted out are directed more toward
Muslims, though no doubt anti-Jewish prejudice always stands ready, should a Continent-wide
plague of brotherhood unexpectedly break out.

In retrospect, of course, we -- especially Americans -- should have seen it coming. We are

unique among developed nations in the respect we accord organized religion -- and its ministers,
especially its tele-ministers. At least, that is true for a significant segment of the American
population. The problem is that conservative American Christians, both Catholic and Protestant,
are stringently Puritanical when it comes to matters sexual, as the recent and ongoing debates
about same-sex marriage, contraception, and abortion eloquently demonstrate. Per your account
of repression, Uncle, we Americans are proficient in sublimating sexual desire into any number
of channels, especially specifically religious channels -- song, worship, evangelism, moral
exhortations, "chastity pledges," etc., etc. -- and so sexual desire becomes the American
equivalent of European anti-Semitism (both Islamophobic and Judaeophobic) and
xenophobia. And as with all such acts of repression, the contents of the id previously repressed
by American sexual morality have a way of returning to haunt us. As usual, with a vengeance.
Hence the Bill Golthard scandal. Hence the Ted Haggard scandal. Hence the Jimmy Swaggart
scandal. Hence the Jim Bakker scandal. Hence the apparently interminable horror of the ongoing
pedophilia scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. Really, Uncle ... need I go on? I think not.
The demons evoked by erotic repression are no less vicious when repressed, and no more
clement when they escape confinement.

To what you have written, Uncle, I would only add the following: perhaps the most insidious
aspect of all these examples of "the return of the repressed" -- an aspect they all share, much as
the aforementioned Hydra shares a common compliment of heads -- is that the "return" is, in
each case, prompted by issues that are real, substantive, deserving of being addressed rationally -
- and that are not at all the product of fevered, bloodshot-eyed prejudice and bigotry. Yes, the
borders of the US really do need to be secured. Yes, substantive steps really do need to be taken
to address income inequality and the consequent withering of the middle class. Yes, Europe
really does need a much more rigorous system of immigration and border control. Yes, the
reluctance of religious minorities to culturally assimilate really is a severe issue -- as even a
casual stroll through the Muswell Hill and Crouch End boroughs of London will
demonstrate. The problem is that, in both the US and Europe, the elites who should have been
dealing with these issues with solicitude, rationality, and moderation have been so derelict for so
long that now -- the people who voted "Leave" in the Brexit referendum do have a salient point
here -- the only way for the repressed to return is through action that is radical, at times
irrational, and in the long run counterproductive.

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So, dear Uncle Sigmund, I leave you with the words of the late Janis Joplin in "Bobby McGee",
words that can serve admirably as an anthem of sorts for "the return of the repressed," words you
perhaps can appreciate even more than we, her contemporaries: sometimes indeed "Freedom's
just another word for nothin' left to lose".

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Chapter 3 – Dealing With Fr. Rolheiser’s “Difficult Passages”
Over the years of studying and dealing with both the practitioners and the practice of theodicy, I
have developed a pretty accurate set of antennae for detecting when even people of undisputed
integrity and good will have gone “a bridge too far” in their zeal to “justify the ways of God to
man” by defending conduct that, in other contexts, would be assessed as unambiguously
criminal. In such cases, God is allowed to breeze by despite conduct that would earn a human a
war-crimes trial at The Hague. No devout monotheist is exempt from this risk, not even the most
temperate, rational, and tolerant. Fr. Ron Rolheiser is a quintessentially temperate, rational, and
tolerant man par excellence, both professionally and personally, as I can attest from having met
him, spoken with him one-to-one, and taken his class on Christian anthropology at Seattle
University’s School of Theology and Ministry back in “the day”. But even Fr. Rolheiser comes
perilously close to the quicksand pit of fatal theodical consistency in his recent defense of certain
“difficult passages” of the Bible, e.g., the genocide of the Amalekites. There are two interrelated
issues with Fr. Rolheiser’s interpretation of those texts.

Fr. Rolheiser wants to argue that these “terrible texts” are intended, not as a factual record of
events – there Fr. Rolheiser and I agree – or even as allegories, but as archetypal parables of the
kind of life we are called upon to live, i.e., a life where all death-dealing forms of behavior are to
be extirpated root and branch. So, e.g., when God commands the Israelites entering the
Promised Land to kill all the indigenous inhabitants, that admonition was never intended as a
categorical command to be literally obeyed, but as a thinly veiled moral injunction to “throw off
everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles [us]” (Heb. 12:1). There are a couple
of “sub-problems” with this understanding, as will be evident from a close reading of Fr.
Rolheiser’s column I link to above.]

o Fr. Rolheiser has a persistent tendency to allow his theology to more or less a priori
determine his reading of the Bible.

I say a persistent tendency because he has dealt with “difficult texts” elsewhere, always
deploying his “theology a priori” paradigm to interpret the text instead of vice versa. For
example, in the “difficult texts” just referenced, he said in scripture as a whole, we see that God
is non-negotiably all-loving, all-merciful, and all-good and that it is impossible to attribute bias,
callousness, brutality, favoritism, and violence to God. Well, in world history "as a whole," we
see that Germany "as a whole" is an enlightened, sophisticated, tolerant (at times, even
iconoclastic), refined, cultured country. But that little phrase "as a whole" tends to elide, e.g., the
Kulturkampf and the Shoah. And Martin Luther's book-burnings. Same here with Fr. Rolheiser's
use of that same little phrase. The obvious response is to say that, yes, the God of the Bible is
“all-loving, all-merciful, and all-good” … except when God isn’t. The “theology a priori”
interpretive paradigm enables an interpreter to use the “difficult texts” as witnesses against
themselves: the very fact that God is depicted as violent, arbitrary, and vindictive then becomes
prima facie evidence that God is not thus! Presuppose up front, as a "first principle," that God is
“all-loving, all-merciful, and all-good”, and of course contrary texts must perforce be
reinterpreted.

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o There seems to be a double standard for when to interpret biblical texts literally and when to
interpret them archetypally, and that distinction is “engineered” in such a way as to exonerate
God.

For example, it is true that [w]e do not, for example, take literally Jesus’ command to “call no
one on earth your father”, nor Paul’s command: “Slaves be subject to your
masters.” Agreed: "we do not ... take literally, etc." ... The begged question, of course, is Why
not? Certainly not because there is any “biblio-centric” rule against such an interpretation. (Even
if the biblical text did contain a rule for interpretation, that rule, being but one more text, would
itself be subject to interpretation! Besides, who is "we"? If we were to use the colloquial
interpretation of biblical texts as our exegetical rule-of-thumb, i.e., what "we" take literally, we
would still be reading the "curse of Ham" narratives in Genesis to justify slavery.) Nevertheless –
this is the second component of this “sub-problem” – we do not, e.g., hesitate to take literally
Jesus’ admonition to His disciples to allow little children to come to Him. There seems to be
nothing symbolic or allegorical, least of all archetypal, about the latter. Instead, we accept Jesus’
affection for children as straightforwardly literal: Jesus liked little kids, and little kids liked
Jesus. Again Why? Why the double interpretive standard?

I have gone into some detail dealing with this question elsewhere. Without reinventing the
wheel, suffice to say that Fr. Rolheiser does not take sufficient note of the cultural determinants
of biblical interpretation. We Westerners, even conservatives, though they would be loath to
own up to it, but especially progressives, self-consciously or not, interpret the Bible through
glasses indelibly colored by Enlightenment-centric biases. We detest slavery. We are knee-
jerkingly suspicious of authority, especially patriarchal authority, i.e., the authority of males in
general and of fathers in particular. Jesus’ listeners, and the early readers of the Gospels,
“suffered” from neither of these “limitations”. (Incidentally, it is difficult to argue that the New
Testament did not accept slavery, given that St. Paul counseled Onesimus to return to his
[Onesimus’] master.) On the other hand, the Enlightenment ethos, especially Romanticism, had
this (‘ way excessive, in my view) rapturous and idealistic view of children. We read these
Enlightenment / Romantic biases into the text: slavery and patriarchy, real bad; kids, real good.
The result is a God Who wants to free the slaves, liberate women from male oppression, and
Who nevertheless really likes kids … a kind of celestial Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Then we turn
around and assert that these 18th-century Enlightenment-European biases are actually there,
archetypally, in the text (except for the goodness of kids, which we take literally), and not just in
our minds.

Now we come to the real problem: once you, as reader, divest yourself of those enculturated, in
fact, most usually unconscious, Enlightenment / Romantic biases about, e.g., the evils of slavery
and, e.g., the goodness of children, then for the sake of intellectual integrity, you have to
seriously consider the possibility that, at the time those texts were written, and at the time their
listeners heard or read them , to those people of that era, maybe there was no critical
interpretive distinction between "literal" and "archetypal". To put the issue another way, we
have to at least consider the possibility that Fr. Rolheiser is advocating for an interpretation of
the biblical text that, for indelibly historical reasons, was simply not available to the people of
the historical epoch in which those texts were written and read. In other words, we have to take
into account, not only the intent of the author, but what the intent of the author could have been.

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Yes, this means asking if the author(s) of, e.g., the Amalekite-genocide narrative wrote the text
with the intent of its being an archetype. But much more than that, could the author(s) have
written the text with that intent? Were they, in their day, capable of forming such a purpose?
And, correspondingly, were the readers capable of forming the corresponding intent in and by
the act of reading?

My answer to all the foregoing "coulds" and "capables": I seriously, gravely, thoroughly doubt
it. In fact, to say that any biblical author could have written any text in either Testament with
"archetypal" intent is like saying that Newton could have written his theory of universal
gravitation so as to accommodate supersymmetry: in both cases, the requisite conceptual
"machinery" simply did not exist. Of course, this leaves open the issue of what God's actual
nature and personality are. What Fr. Rolheiser is, as a matter of fact, defending is not the Bible
qua Bible, but our "Enlightenment-centric" understanding of, and presuppositions concerning,
the Bible. Which leaves the following questions unresolved. Is God really vindictive? Is God
really violent? Does God really play favorites? My answer: we cannot know. As with Kant, the
Ding an sich -- the noumenal "thing-in-itself" that lies behind phenomenal perceptions /
interpretations -- is inaccessible. At most, and taking the biblical texts at face value, the most we
can say is that the biblical authors wrote their theological parables in such a way as to reflect
their and their cultures' perception that, yes, God is / is capable of all those things. And if we try
to get past the biblical authors' subjectivity, we only encounter our own.

So to borrow from the old Scholastics, Omnia exeunt in mysterium.

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Chapter 4 – Pu’uhonua O Honaunau and Restorative Justice
Everything I know about criminal justice and prison / incarceration reform could be written on
the head of a pin, with ample room left over to inscribe Tolkien’s complete Lord of the Rings
cycle. So the following comments should not be interpreted as any kind of implicit claim to
expertise about court procedure, sentencing guidelines, parole criteria, or any related issues. But
in my lifetime, I have learned a thing or two, not about prisons and incarceration, but about Spirit
… provided you do not question me too closely about precisely what I mean by the word
“Spirit,” a term I will leave discreetly undefined, other than to say I do not mean any
monotheistic God, but that Jung’s synchronicity might be closer to the mark. Anyway, perhaps
the most salient thing I have learned in my 68 years, even ‘way back when I did equate “Spirit”
with “God,” is that Spirit is sneaky, marvelously, incorrigibly sneaky. Not in a duplicitous or
malicious, least of all, mendacious way, but subtle, stealthy – and above all unexpected, even
un-expect-able. “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell
where it comes from or where it is going … “. One of the places where, for me, the wind of
Spirit blows most strongly is a sacred Hawaiian village named Pu’uhonua o Honaunau – in
Hawaiian “the Refuge of Honaunau”.

Diane and I first visited Pu’uhohua o Honaunau a couple years after we were married, when we
were driving south down the west coast of the Big Island from Kona / Kailua to Kealakakua and
toward the Ka’u Desert and South Point, at the southernmost “point” of the Big Island. If the Big
Island were a clock face, Kona / Kailua would be between 9 and 10 o’clock, and Pu’uhonua o
Honaunau would be at perhaps 8 o’clock. It was – still is – a National Park, and looked
interesting, partly because it was a several-hundred-year-old “old Hawaiian” village, but also
because I had heard anecdotes about tourists violating the curse of the pu’uhonua (“refuge”, a
generic noun), whereby people who take “souvenirs” from the village – shells, rocks, driftwood,
etc. – incurred runs of bad luck that persisted until the purloined items were returned to the
village, most often by being mailed back to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, care of the National Park
Service, usually accompanied by an appropriately contrite letter of apology. Whereupon the
string of bad luck ceased. Did I believe these stories? Not at the time, and not all the time even
now … but … well … now mostly yes … and remember, I say that as the Skeptic-In-
Residence: “ … you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going”.

When I first set foot inside the precincts of the pu’uhonua¸ I was struck by a feeling, sheerly
visceral, that to this day I find difficult to describe. Remember in what follow that, upon
entering, I knew nothing of the pu’uhonua in any discursive, rational sense. But what I felt
was – not fear, not intimidation, not “creeped out” in the Salem’s Lot sense, perhaps least of all
threatened … none of that – but … Have you ever read Rudolf Otto’s classic The Idea of the
Holy? If you have, you have encountered Otto’s no-less-classic description of the experience of
the Holy as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans – literally “the Mystery that induces trembling
(tremendum) and irresistible attraction (fascinans)”. In fact, like Otto’s generic description of the
Holy, my description of the Holy – in Otto’s sense of the “numinous” – must be couched in
terms of feeling / affect, not lexical rigor. I felt the Holy, the numinous at Pu’uhonua o
Honaunau. We wandered along the beach, observing and respecting the various rules of the
place posted by the National Park Service on signs along the way, not even attempting to find a
way inside the kapu (forbidden / taboo in Hawaiian) space of the inner sanctum. As we were

12
leaving, I picked up a Park Service brochure and read it on the way back to our hotel – and
discovered the reason for my feelings and why they were more than justified.

Scattered across the Hawaiian Islands, there are several dozen pu’uhonua – refuges – like
Pu’uhonua o Honaunau. They were refuges in the sense that, if you committed a crime, you
could escape the secular consequences if you could somehow walk, swim, or otherwise travel to
a pu’uhonua and basically throw yourself on the mercy of the priest(s) of the refuge. As long as
you were inside that sacred enclosure, the law could not touch you. Then the work began of your
making restitution, and of re-integrating you into the society from which your crime had
alienated you. This is where my knowledge of old Hawaiian ritual, custom, and religion gets
diaphanously, unreliably thin. But, generically speaking, the priest(s) would require that, as the
offender, you perform certain tasks, participate in certain rituals – rather like the great labors of
Hercules in Greek mythology – that, once completed, would culminate in the slate being wiped
clean and your readmission into society as a member in good standing. My understanding is that
the labors could require anywhere from a few days to several years to accomplish, depending on
the severity of the original offense. But regardless of the time required, this was not seen,
described, or depicted as punishment, as recrimination, as retaliation, as retribution, as “You done
somethin’ bad to us, so we’re gonna do somethin’ bad to you”. This is where the analogy with
Hercules breaks down. The goddess Hera’s purpose was to punish and to torment Hercules. The
purpose of the labors imposed on the offender, on the contrary, is restitution and re-integration
… in other words, healing of all parties to the offense, the offender no less than the offended.

I will leave to others far better versed than I in the technicalities of prison / criminal justice
reform how best to apply some cognate of the pu’uhonua paradigm to issues of the
administration of justice, venturing only the commonplace – and common-sense -- observation
that a system which relies upon mass incarceration to “reform” criminal behavior, and that,
instead, transforms prisons into graduate schools of recidivism and criminal technique can hardly
afford to condescend and thumb its collective nose at the example the old Hawaiians provide in
their cities of refuge. Maybe the old Hawaiians did not do any better than we. But they could
hardly do any worse. Instead, I will apply the lesson of Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, not to penology,
but to theology. In the history of Christianity, the two are intimately connected. (The first
penitentiaries were, as the noun implies, originally religious communities of sorts: places where
convicted criminals were sent to sit in silence and solitude, contemplating their crimes until they
experienced some species of Divine visitation that would eventuate in illumination and
repentance.) Both disciplines – penology and theology – were predicated on the principle that
injury demands retribution – injury to society, and injury to God, each of which is inseparable
from the other. That is the essence of Cur Deus Homo, St. Anselm’s 11th-century CE account of
how and from what Christ’s death saves us. Human sin has offended God, much as, e.g., a
commoner sleeping with a royal daughter offends the lord of the manor. The lord of the manor –
God – demands compensation through the mechanism of retributive justice, i.e., usually the
death of the offending commoner, and will not rest until the offender has been pursued,
apprehended, and executed. Jesus takes our place, says Anselm, and willingly accepts the
punishment rightfully due us as sinners. (Think of any Billy Graham sermon. I should probably
note here, in all fairness, that the Anselmian concept of salvation through vicarious retributive
justice is no longer the only conceptualization of salvation, except in very conservative
evangelical Christian sects. In fact, it was not even the only such conception in the centuries after

13
Anselm, e.g. Peter Abelard.) There is a lot to criticize in Anselm’s account, of course. But for
now, I want to concentrate on the idea of pursuit.

So God, as the offended Liege Lord, pursues the sinner. Likewise, in old Hawaii, law
enforcement from the offended village pursued the criminal – for reasons St. Anselm would have
understood -- across land and over ocean, to the pu’uhonua. But within the sacred boundaries
of the pu’uhonua, a new paradigm takes over, superseding the paradigm of punishment
and retribution. The pursuit ends there. At that point, a paradigm of healing and
reconciliation, under the auspices of the gods, supersedes the “civil” paradigm (for so we would
call it) of recrimination and retribution. (Of course, in the New Testament, St. Paul also
emphasizes reconciliation – but for Paul, reconciliation with God is only possible on the prior
basis of the Sacrifice of Christ, for “without the shedding of blood there is no atonement for
sin”.) The key principle here is recognition of and respect for boundaries – in the Hawaiian case,
the physical boundaries of the pu’uhonua as the physical referent of the moral boundaries of the
offender, understood as the willingness of the offender to seek reconciliation. (Absent that
willingness, the offender would not have undertaken the arduous journey to the sanctuary in the
first place – which, in a way, is the first labor all offenders undertake.) Pursuit ends where the
willingness of the offender to submit to the work of reconciliation and restitution
begins. Of course, in the Christian paradigm, reconciliation and restitution are highly desirable,
also, but they have no efficacy apart from the violent Sacrifice of Christ (Hebrews 9:12-13). So
in the end, in the Christian understanding, we return full-circle to the paradigm of sin,
recrimination, and punishment – which is inseparable from the archetype of Pursuit by God. The
Pursuit never ends apart from (in some sense or other) sacrifice. From that there is no shelter, no
refuge, no pu’uhonua.

I know very well what it is to be pursued, especially as what many would consider a “lapsed
Christian”. Being pursued, in fact, is a motif that runs through my experience of Christianity and
the Christian God. The only shelter, the only sanctuary, I ever found, I found rather late in life in
my marriage, in particular, my marriage into a large and lavishly welcoming / generous extended
family of Japanese Buddhists. My wife, and, through her, in-law family, is my pu’uhonua, my
refuge. My experience of refuge with them has, over the years, completely top-to-bottom revised
and renovated my most fundamental conception of religion and spirituality – very much
including Christian spirituality. That is obviously far too long a story to tell here. I have written
of it over my years as – the irony is exquisite! – Skeptic-In-Residence for Beguine and them Be-
Zine. Suffice to say that it has been a story written in terms of personal moral and spiritual
boundaries (re-)established and – this time around – recognized and respected. I no longer feel
pursued by God or by God’s agents, like an escaped slave under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
This relief from Pursuit and the finding of refuge had mundane but important practical effects,
too, like – this is just one example – the mitigation, almost an eradication, of a life-long
propensity for panic attacks. (Another story too long to tell here.) It also showed me the dark side
of such universally beloved – though no longer by me – works of Christian literature as Francis
Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”, which now, in my mind, bears an uncomfortable
resemblance to a county sheriff setting his hounds on the trail in pursuit of an escaped slave as in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So in an uncanny kind of way, I can understand, on a gut level, how
important Pu’uhonua o Honaunau was, many hundreds of years ago, to indigenous Hawaiians

14
who ran afoul of taboos and laws. Being a 21st-century man, my experience is different, of
course. Yet on some “archetypal” level the same.

As I said, Spirit is sneaky.

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Chapter 5 – Suicide and the Limits of Altruism
This “Skeptic’s” column tackles a subject that is both delicate and volatile: suicide. People who
have known me for a fairly long time are well acquainted with a time in my life – during the time
in Boston and later during the equally ill-advised quest for the MDiv -- when I was undergoing
episodes of very severe, quite arguably pre-suicidal, clinical depression. So – for the benefit of
those people, for “my mariners, souls that have toiled and wrought and thought with me” – I
want to emphasize that the following column does not describe me as I am now. Quite the
contrary. I am not in crisis. I am not depressed. I am not afflicted with suicidal ideation – a term
I came to know all too intimately during the “winter of [my] discontent”. So those of you
familiar with my past history and struggles – relax. There has never been a time in my life when I
am less in crisis, less depressed, less afflicted with suicidal thoughts than now. Mostly I credit
my wife and my stellar in-law family with this resurrection. In fact, that I can discuss this
subject at all now is exactly because I am calm and at peace. But not everyone is as fortunate as
I.

=====================================

Albert Camus, writing in the very first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus, is right: the question of
suicide is the most serious philosophical problem. He is also right in saying that “[all other
philosophical questions] are games; one must first answer”. The usual response to someone
arguing against suicide is to say that the person threatening suicide does so by disregarding the
feelings of shock and grief her suicide would leave behind. The person seriously contemplating
suicide – so this argument goes – values her own desire for relief from feelings of depression,
sadness, frustration, etc., over the feelings of bereavement her suicide will engender in the living.
On this account, it is often argued that suicide is the ultimate selfish act. The Catch-22 is
obvious: by terminating oneself, one paradoxically exalts one’s annihilated self above all other
considerations on the part of all other still-existing selves. The self that no longer exists is
privileged above the selves that survive. Death is privileged above life. This position seems
compelling. But the problem is that this argument against committing suicide also lacks integrity
because it is equally selfish.

To understand why, turn the previous argument around. If I know that a good friend is
contemplating suicide, what are my feelings? Anticipatory grief, certainly, alarm, an urgent sense
of all-overriding aversion, an aversion to the grief I will feel if my friend actually succeeds in her
stated intention to kill herself. I will grieve to the point of agony. Nightmare visions haunt my
fitful sleep of what my world will be like without her in it, when her absence begins to haunt me
like Banquo’s ghost at MacBeth’s feast. I would do quite literally anything to avoid these
consequences. At this point, I might well employ the argument in the preceding paragraph: I
might very well plead with my friend to relent from her suicidal intent by telling her that killing
herself would be the ultimate selfish act, because the consequences of her suicide – her
permanent absence – would be indescribably painful to me, in fact, to all those who love and
value her. The question I would ask at this point is simply this: how is it not equally selfish of
me to tell my suicide-prone friend that, no, she must not kill herself because doing so would
subject me to levels of agony I would find intolerable. Consequently, my conclusion is that, in

16
order for me to avoid those consequences to myself, my friend must continue – for my sake and
for my convenience – to continue living a life that she herself finds unbearably painful.

So employing the “selfishness argument” to deter someone from committing suicide instantly
involves one in a kind of macabre tug-of-war that, by its very nature, cannot be resolved. No one
can win. My suicide-prone friend says to me “I must end my life, even if it inflicts pain on you,
because ending my pain takes precedence over causing yours”. Yes, that is a selfish argument.
But I, pulling the tug-of-war rope the opposite direction, reply “No, you must not commit suicide
because the pain I will experience by your absence takes precedence over the pain you are
already experiencing in living your life”. If you have ever watched the TV series Breaking Bad,
you will have seen just this stalemate acted out in the “talking pillow” scene early in the first
season when the protagonist, Walter White (unforgettably depicted by Bryan Cranston), sits
down with his wife Skyler, their son Walt Jr., Walt’s sister-in-law Marie, and her DEA-agent
husband Hank Schrader to discuss Walt’s decision to not undergo treatment for his recently
diagnosed stage-4 lung cancer: the whole “talking pillow” sequence, regardless of whatever
specific form it assumes in a particular real-world case, is always a deep-noir zero-sum game in
which, if one party wins, the other must lose. Life wagers against death, and any talk of
“compromise” is sheer travesty. It is not clear to me that one direction in this tug-or-war is any
less selfish than the other. In fact and on the contrary, selfishness is a useless ethical metric in
assessing the morality of suicide. Each party to the conversation is attempting to privilege their
pain over that of their conversation partner.

Once rational argument has been exhausted -- assuming it was ever relevant in the first place,
which is far from obvious -- the usual alternative is to recur to some religious justification for
forbidding suicide. Again, this strategy is superficially plausible, but turns out to be either
useless or worse than useless. A few examples:

o We are told that life is a gift of God, and that suicide amounts to not only rejecting that gift, but
throwing it back in God's face. Fortunately, I doubt that we use this reasoning to critique kids'
refusal to eat Halloween candy in which the donor has embedded, say, razor blades. A parent
who urged his child to eat the Snickers bar notwithstanding, to somehow overlook the razor
blades lacerating his gums as he chewed, and to be grateful to the people generous enough to
give such a gift, would be a parent who was a prime candidate for child abuse. The plain fact of
the matter -- which I insist we would all acknowledge in any other, non-theological context -- is
that some circumstances render life a curse to be avoided instead of a gift to be cherished. That
God is the Giver of the gift does not change that conclusion -- though such a "gift" may well
fundamentally alter our estimate of God's character. A God Who hides razor blades in the candy
of Life is a God from Whom one might well want to keep one's distance.

o Or there is the "sufferings of Christ" argument ... The suffering, physical or psychological, we
are experiencing can be viewed as a finite replication of the infinite Suffering of the Crucified
Jesus and, not terminated by suicide, but instead offered up to Him as a sacrifice. The most
succinct response I can think of is that of a moral theology professor, a friend of mine, who said
that when anyone suggests offering up suffering to Jesus, my moral-theologian friend said he is
always tempted to ask, and sometimes actually does ask, "What makes you think Jesus wants it?"
My response is more cerebrally theological: Jesus undertook His suffering voluntarily, so on

17
what basis does God overrule my volition and so coerce me into my counterpart? Does God
undertake to squeeze suffering out of us coercively rather as one would attempt to squeeze blood
out of a turnip? If so, why would I want to please such a Deity?

o Some argue that suicide is a manifestation of God's sovereignty in the sometimes-medicine-

has-to-taste-bad-to-do-good sense of Romans 8:28-35 whereby "all things work together for
good" in such a way that humans' -- anyway, some humans' -- intimacy with God and with one
another is actually enhanced by one of the two parties taking her / his own life as a gateway into
a deeper relationship. No response is better than that of C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed when he
writes of his grief over the death of his wife Joy Davidman Gresham:

She used to quote ‘Alone into the Alone.’ She said it felt like that. And how immensely
improbable that it should be otherwise! Time and space and body were the very things that
brought us together; the telephone wires by which we communicated. Cut one off, or cut both off
simultaneously. Either way, mustn’t the conversation stop? Unless you assume that some other
means of communication—utterly different, yet doing the same work—would be immediately
substituted. But then, what conceivable point could there be in severing the old ones? Is God a
clown who whips away your bowl of soup one moment in order, next moment, to replace it with
another bowl of the same soup? Even nature isn’t such a clown as that.

(One possible response to Lewis's concluding question might be to point out that, whereas the
sufferings inflicted by nature ultimately all result from a confluence of natural laws, which are
presumably blindly non-volitional, the sufferings inflicted by, e.g., God's bait-and-switch games
with soup are presumably inflicted by Divine will and purpose, which, because they are
unknowable, might well be traceable to mendacious motives humans would justifiably call cruel.
Such a God undoubtedly would "move[] in mysterious ways". But whether one should be
comforted or terrified by that principle is not clear. If God really is ganz andere, all analogies of
God with Nature are automatically suspect.)

Of all the theological responses with which I am familiar, however, the only one I have any
respect for is taken from Fr. Ron Rolheiser's more-or-less annual column on suicide. I say
"theological" and not "theodical" because Fr. Rolheiser adopts the expedient of skipping
theodicy altogether and going directly to theology, understood as discourse on the character of
God with no attempt to "justify the ways of God to man". As I have noted elsewhere, theodicy
always entails the attempt to deny certain truths that, in other contexts, are simply too obvious to
deny. In other words, theodicy always involves the justification of faith by recourse to bad faith
(in Sartre's sense of mauvaise foi) of feigning ignorance by pretending not to know that which
we do know all too well. Fr. Rolheiser boldly avoids that quicksand by not going to that part of
the forest in the first place, and emphasizing instead that, the theodical dimension of suicide
being however it may, Christians may be comforted by the knowledge that, issues of moral right
and wrong aside, suicide never separates one from the love and tenderness of God, even on the
far side of death. While one might wish that Fr. Rolheiser would be more explicit about his intent
to avoid the Tar Baby of theodicy, in the end I can only admire his refusal to avoid the trap.

His reticence about the former issue renders his response to the latter immeasurably more
credible. Often "I don't know" is the only response with any integrity.

18
Chapter 6 – The Ethics of Gratitude
Today's "Skeptic's Collection" column is rendered all too relevant by recent tragic events at the
First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX.

Over the last several years, I have gradually developed what some religious folk might well
consider a bad personal tradition -- though I think it is a very good one! -- of occasionally
dropping a turd in the ideological punch bowl of monotheistic, especially Christian, belief, not
by denying any orthodox Christian teachings, but on the contrary, by thinking through those
teachings’ logical implications more consistently than most Christians are willing to do. So,
e.g., the Jesus of the Incarnation is fully God, not only because He loves to play with little kids,
but also because on occasion he loves, or at least is willing, to slaughter them, if the biblical
account of His character is to be accepted. Similar remarks also call into grave question whether
the God of Christianity really is a God Who celebrates life. I cannot prove, but strongly suspect,
that an awareness of these issues is the tacit, perhaps even unconscious and unacknowledged,
motivation behind the reluctance of many progressive Christians to ascribe to God anything like
agency, i.e., a tendency to intervene in human history, individually or collectively: if God is the
kind of God Who “does stuff”, i.e., if God is a God Who is sometimes an efficient cause, then
logical consistency would seem to require us to concede that God sometimes does “bad stuff”,
occasionally really “bad stuff”. The solution would seem simple: rewrite theology such that
God is no longer an efficient cause, i.e., so that God “does nothing” in a cause-effect sense.
(Even Pope Francis got into the God-as-non-magician act.) But there is an Olympus Mons of a
speed-bump with that approach: the practice of gratitude toward God. Which begs a huge
question: if God really does do nothing, what do we do with Thanksgiving?

Now, by way of making important distinctions, there are at least two different ways in which we
can express gratitude and give thanks -- both quite healthy and legitimate. We can …

o … give thanks that something happened or did not happen

I am thankful that, in May of 2007, the ambulance service and medical professionals in
Singapore responded with such grace, over-the-top urgency, and invincible competence to the
broken jaw I sustained when I tripped exiting a taxi van during a business trip. I am thankful that
Boeing’s workers’ compensation shielded my wife and me from any financial impact
whatsoever, and, in fact, turned a week and a half in Singapore into a one-month de facto
vacation (i.e., until my maxillofacial surgeon considered me stable enough to travel back to the
States). I am thankful that my wife and I do not live anywhere near the Gulf Coast of TX or LA,
and so must worry every year about hurricane season, especially within the context of a warming
planet and changing climate. I am thankful that I was not in New York City on 11 September
2001. I am thankful that we had good weather at our house during the solar eclipse, and also
thankful that we did not, as originally planned before we had second thoughts, undertake the
pilgrimage to Oregon, and so get caught up in “Eclipse-Mageddon” wherein every other person
west of the Cascades, and their household pets, evidently converged on the vicinity of Eugene,
OR. Anyway … you get the picture …

o … give thanks to someone for something they did or had some collaborative part in doing

19
I am thankful to my wife for undertaking a 24-hour flight from Seattle to Singapore, by way of
San Francisco, when one of my Boeing colleagues in Singapore called her at work to inform her
that I had fallen, busted my jaw, and was having reconstructive maxillofacial surgery. No
hesitation. No remonstrance. No complaints. No commiseration. She just dropped everything,
packed everything, and … by Gawd … came. I am thankful to Dr. Andrew Tay, my surgeon in
Singapore, who wields a scalpel with the virtuosity of Yitzhak Perlman playing a violin. I am
thankful to my Boeing colleagues who closed ranks around me like the Spartans around
Leonidas at Thermopylae – people from the States, Japan, China, India, Singapore, Finland, the
Netherlands … unlike the United Nations in New York, our extemporaneous United Nations
actually worked. I am thankful to my in-law family, who never treated me like the new kid on the
block, never “evaluated” me, and only wanted me to grab a beer, some sushi, some sashimi, a
burger, some mac salad, sit down, laugh, tell bad jokes, and generally “talk story,” as they say in
Hawaii. I was eager to oblige: I ceased being a stranger the instant I crossed my in-laws’
threshold. I am thankful especially to my mother-in-law, who is sincerely convinced that I
should be the CEO of Boeing, at least, and preferably the President of the United States. With
equal sincerity, she thinks I could do a much better job than Trump. To hell with modesty: I
think Mom Iwashita is right. Anyway ... again … you get the picture …

Bottom line: being thankful that is thankfulness directed toward some set of “just-so”
circumstances, which may be due to just dumb luck. But being thankful to someone is
thankfulness directed toward someone, i.e., some conscious, volitional agent. So the latter is
thankfulness directed toward some such agent who “does stuff”.

Now, if God does not “do stuff” – that is, in technical Aristotelian / Thomistic language, if God
is not an efficient cause – then, from a strictly theological standpoint, there is no volitional agent
involved. (From a finite, human standpoint, it is quite otherwise: humans certainly do "do stuff",
i.e., are efficient causes.) So if God is not an efficient cause, if God does not “do stuff,” then the
only way anything gets done, the only kind of causality that exists in the Universe, is the kind of
causality that can justify only thankfulness that or thankfulness to, i.e., things could have been
otherwise, but in fact just turned out the way they did ("that" or "for"), or conditions resulting
from human action {"to"). If my attention wanders while driving and I run a red light but am not
destroyed by a car on the cross street, I can be thankful that I was not hit – but I cannot be
thankful to God for any kind of intervention, however subtle, by Divine Providence or prevenient
action. In that latter case, because God does not “do stuff”, because God is not an efficient cause,
there is no “to” to Whom to be thankful. I am left with dumb luck and happenstance: I was just
lucky.

This refusal to ascribe efficient causality -- of "doing stuff" -- to God radically changes the entire
tenor of our Thanksgiving celebrations, at least in cultures with a predominantly monotheistic
religious ideology. If our friends and family are all intact, well, healthy, and prosperous, if no
one is starving, if no one is terminally ill, if no one is feeding an opioid habit, etc., etc., then that
state of affairs, taken mostly for granted by those of us who enjoy it, is attributable to either (a)
hard work on our part (where "our" means "us as individuals and those who care for us and help
us" in John Donne's sense) and / or (b) dumb luck and the imponderables of circumstance ...
most often some combination of (a) and (b).

20
This conclusion has (at least) two immediate consequences:

o It is pointless to pray to God for someone or something if by the locution "praying to God" you
mean "petitioning God to act as an efficient cause so as to alter some circumstance in someone's
life, e.g., cure a disease, find a job, mend some relationship, etc., etc."

There is no point in asking God to "do stuff" if God does not "do stuff". (So, e.g., those of you
who are "praying for" the members of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX, why
do you bother? Exercise for reader.) And if God does not "do stuff", it is equally pointless to
thank God for "doing stuff" -- for the same reason it would be pointless to thank me that Seal
Team 6 returned safe and sound from the Usama bin Laden raid, i.e., I had nothing to do with it.
(Of course, if there had been casualties, it would have been equally pointless to blame me ...
which is, I believe, sorta-kinda the point of keeping God antiseptically separated from the
grubby, messy flow of history: it obviates the Problem of Evil. If God is not an efficient cause,
then God does not deserve the credit, and therefore, as a corollary, neither does God deserve the
blame. Of course, there remains now the "Problem of the Incarnation". But, again, that's another
rant altogether.)

Now, the practice of refusing to ascribe efficient causality -- "doing stuff" -- to God would most
likely come as a surprise to the biblical writers, especially, though not exclusively, in the Hebrew
Bible, whose God was "doing stuff" most of the time, but also in the New Testament (e.g., James
4:2, 3; 5:14, 15, John ch. 11). In a pre-scientific culture, this is quite understandable: absent an
understanding of physical law, it is natural to ascribe, e.g., earthquakes, good harvests, solar
eclipses, etc., to the action of God -- God acted as an efficient cause and gave a good harvest --
and to be thankful to God when the result was beneficial. But the Christian doctrine of the
Incarnation is not as easily accounted for, because it is at least difficult, if not flatly impossible,
to infer the Incarnation from the premise of a "non-interventionist" God Who does not "do stuff".
But these are also all rants for another time. For now, let's stipulate that God does not "do stuff".

o If indeed God does not "do stuff," and if alterations in external / objective circumstances (cf.
Matthew ch. 25) result exclusively from some combination of human action and dumb luck, then
it is deeply dishonest, in fact, moral plagiarism to take human goodness and attribute it to God.

Why? Because we have already stipulated that God does not "do stuff". The only efficient causes
attributable to volitional agents are human beings.

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving!

PS -- Just to tantalize you and to add to your perplexity, it is possible to "un-drop" the preceding
turd into the metaphysical / theological punch bowl -- or, if you prefer, to "un-ring" the bell or to
"un-squeeze" the toothpaste -- via a strategy that was briefly explored first by the early 6th
century CE philosopher Boethius, vis a vis the compatibility of human moral freedom with the
sovereignty of God. The relevant text is Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. An updated
version of Boethius' argument is arguably C. G. Jung's concept of synchronicity, as described in
his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle. But -- once more -- those are other rants for
other times. For now, just chew on this along with your turkey and dressing.

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Chapter 7 – The Making of an Un-Lapsed Catholic
For the past … I dunno … dozen-plus years, I have been what polite people would call a “lapsed
Catholic”. I say this even though I met the Catholic Church at a time of spiritual shipwreck /
accedie – what some call the “noonday demon” -- and that the Church gave me a vision of
humans in community with the Divine that I never found, either as a fundamentalist, or as a non-
fundamentalist but still conservative-evangelical, Christian. It may be that the Catholic Church
saved my life. To this day, the issues I have are not only or even primarily with the Catholic
Church – I mean, who among us with a non-flat-line EEG does not have issues with the Church?
– but primarily with that Church’s God. (Or as I usually express it these days, “Gawd”.) But that
latter is another rant for another time. The question I want to deal with now is one that, unlike
my issues with God / “Gawd”, I have never before broached in a “Skeptic’s” column: the sky
being the limit and ignoring issues of possible / impossible, what would I have to find in a
religious tradition, Christian or otherwise, that would enable me to be “un-lapsed”? Two “first
principles” up front: (1) when I cite biblical references, I do not assume that whatever narrative I
am discussing is historically factual, and so treat it purely as a religious / theological parable;
(2) I speak only and purely for myself and myself alone, no one else. After several years of
reading and meditating on this issue, this is where I am now … tentatively. I am looking for a
religious tradition that …

o … minors on God – assuming God plays any role at all – and majors on people

When I say “God”, I mean a personal God Who could, perhaps occasionally does, intervene in
the world and in people’s lives. Even a cursory study of religious history will demonstrate that
such a personal, “interventionist” God has wreaked havoc and butchery in human history. But I
am powerfully attracted to the Holy, to what Rudolf Otto, in his classic The Idea of the Holy,
termed the mysterium tremendum et fascinans (“the tremble-inducing and attractive
mystery”). Otto’s mysterium is more a feeling, an intuition than it is something that can be
grabbed hold of, articulated, and described discursively. Think of Antonio Allegri’s great
Miserere. Think of looking at the Hubble Telescope’s images of the “Pillars of Creation”. Think
of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party”. Think of reading Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed
a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”. I think of a question I once encountered on a math mid-term
that had me stumped – and that I solved by whipping out scratch paper and a pencil and proving
from scratch the theorem on which the solution was based … then implementing that theorem to
derive the answer. In other words, think of Maslow’s concept of a “peak experience” or of R. M.
Buck’s “cosmic consciousness”. That is religion at its best. That, in fact, is what Christians,
whether they realize it or not, mean by “grace”. That is religion that majors on people and minors
on God.

o … takes seriously people’s personal experience

One reason I dropped out of Christianity altogether – in fact, one reason I dropped out of
monotheistic religion per se altogether – was because I got sick unto death of being told, almost
always by clergy and quite often by lay people, that my personal experience was deceptive and
not to be taken as revelatory of anything in particular, and that what was worthy of being taken
seriously was another layer or level, invisible and inaccessible to me, that lent that experience a

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credibility it did not have on its own. (On the other hand, when my personal experience tended to
corroborate official dogma, the same people who before counseled skepticism turned around
180 degrees and now counseled acceptance. Go figure ... ) The world looked chaotic, but I was
told that there was a level of Reality that would resolve the chaos into a sublime Order.

Try explaining this, as I had to do during one period in my life as a para-professional grief
counselor, to someone whose child has just died of leukemia, despite having just completed the
latest protocol of chemotherapy and radiation. What possible level of Reality possesses an order
that can resolve the unalloyed tragedy of the death of someone’s twelve-year-old daughter?
Along toward the end of my tenure as a counselor, I was driven to adopt the approach of C. S.
Lewis, as depicted in the movie Shadowlands, when, Lewis’s beloved wife Joy Davidman Lewis
having just died, the local Anglican clergyman tries to comfort Lewis by reassuring Lewis that
all the chaos precipitated by Joy’s death was resolved by some transcendent Order: “No, Harry,”
Lewis tells the well-intended clergyman, “It’s just a damned mess”. (I learned a new word
recently: "gas-lighting". The minister's remark is a perfect example of gas-lighting: convincing
people that they did not experience what they did experience.) Anyway, I am looking for a
religious tradition that does not traffic in gas-lighting, i.e., that begins with the mess, lets it be a
mess, and simply sits with the mess with no attempt to “redeem” or to “resolve” it, least of all to
“explain” or to “justify” it. And if the experience in question is something positive, do not drain it
of significance by attributing it to God. Stealing any human exercise of any human virtue and
using it to enhance God’s “street cred” is an act of moral plagiarism that decisively refutes any
claim to righteousness of any monotheistic God commanding one’s allegiance.

o ... uses religious / sacred literature without being used by it

I long ago became accustomed to Christians -- in fact, to monotheists generally -- who, upon
reading some especially horrendous text in their sacred literature, felt immediately impelled to
defend God's behavior as actually good and beautiful. (By the way, such a defense always means
that one is not allowed to take one's personal experience seriously, in violation of the previous
principle.) My "canonical" example in this regard is the slaughter -- more accurately, the
genocide -- of the Amalekites in I Sam. chapter 15. This text is most likely not historically
factual. But think of the implications, even on the level of theological parable: God's character is
such that God not only countenances, but imperiously commands, genocide. Now, no one I know
approves of genocide by anyone in any context ... except for certain Christians -- by no means all
-- who read this obscene text and immediately turn around 180 degrees and shift into "theodicy
mode", concerned to praise God for committing an act that would land any human agent before
the International Court of Justice in The Hague to stand trial for a crime against humanity. Not to
belabor the point, but such is the moral conundrum that becomes inevitable when you avow a
belief in a personal, monotheistic God Whose character is authoritatively revealed in any
religious / sacred text. Such a combination virtually guarantees that any religion promoting such
a theology is immediately converted into a thinly veiled species of celestial fascism. So any
religious tradition for whose sake I would consider being "un-lapsed" would consider its sacred
text(s) -- to whose existence I have no objection at all! -- as on the same plane as, e.g.,
Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, and Flannery O'Connor.

o ... does not conceive of prayer as an efficient / instrumental cause

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Religious traditions that emphasize prayer to an omnipotent and omniscient God as a means of
"doing stuff" are guaranteed to "lapse" me. This is another reason why I walked away from
Christianity: my experience with Christianity has been an almost unrelieved experience of serial
disappointment, where I prayed for X ... and X did not occur. It seems to me that, even if you
believe in a monotheistic, personal God, such a conception of prayer is at least blasphemy-
adjacent, because it amounts to an attempt to "leverage" God the way you would use a tree limb
on a fulcrum to move a boulder. Aside from that, combining religion, belief in a monotheistic
God, and prayer-as-efficient-cause has, speaking only out of my experience, guaranteed
disappointment, occasionally catastrophic levels of disappointment. I no longer believe in a
personal, monotheistic God, but if I did, here is the advice I would give Her: if You promise
what You have no intention of delivering, all You succeed in doing is giving people an excuse to
walk away, in other words, to become "lapsed". I can be fooled once, in fact, I am a push-over.
But fooling me twice is damn near impossible. So just don't start.

The religious tradition that comes closest to satisfying the foregoing requirements / criteria is
Pure-Land Buddhism. But this is a work in progress. Will advise ... and thanks for listening!

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Chapter 8 – Leaving One’s Theological Cherries Un-Picked
A little over a week ago, as this is written (28 October 2016), I published a “Skeptic’s
Collection” column in which I adopted a rather “contrarian” view of three well-known texts in
the Bible: Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (the Akedah), the Annunciation, and the
Crucifixion. As I said at the time, though without using this analogy, all three narratives have a
kind of Jungian “shadow” side, i.e., morally and psychologically dubious aspects that most
Christians are careful to avoid thinking about, but that, in the name of simple intellectual
integrity, deserve to be acknowledged and foregrounded, even on a cursory reading. There are
several ways of dealing with this textual “shadow,” one of which is asserting that, since God
gave human beings intelligence and a rational faculty, we should use both to critique the
chthonic aspects of these narratives in the interest of domesticating them so as to selectively use
them for moral reflection and practice. Superficially, this sounds quite reasonable, and so it is. I
don’t know that I want to interpret the Akedah as authorizing wholesale child sacrifice on the
pretext that “God told me to do it”. But at the same time, rational critique of such texts does raise
two issues that deserve acknowledgement no less than the texts themselves: (a) the possibility
that unrestricted critique of “difficult” texts like the Akedah and the Annunciation amounts to a
strategy of eventually adopting atheism a millimeter at a time – with which I have no problem,
providing only that it is done with both eyes open -- and (b) the perhaps even deeper question of
precisely what it is that religious people are attempting to preserve by recourse to (a).

If we refuse, as I do, to read the various narrative texts in the Bible as factual, space-time-
historical accounts of events that actually occurred and see them instead as “just-so stories”
encoding a culture’s theology, then we immediately have a problem: the truth-status of these
parables. What are these stories, anyway, in a generic sense? Take an example: the
slaughter of the Amalekites in I Samuel, chapter 15. Note that we need not take the story
literally as a record of something that occurred in space-time history to take it seriously as a
culture’s reflection on the character of its God, any more than we need to take Moby Dick
literally as an account of an actual whaling voyage to take it seriously as Melville’s reflection
on the dangers of monomania and obsession. But even interpreting the story as a parable leaves
the issue of truth-status untouched: is the theology encoded in the story of the genocide of the
Amalekites true … is God really, actually that way? Does God really, actually condone – at
times even command – genocide? At this point, unless we are hopeless moral illiterates, we
recoil in revulsion and horror: “Of course not!” we choke out, gagging on the noxious fumes of
moral putrefaction. Our 21st-century, Enlightenment-tutored, Christianized sensibilities (but
there are "shadow" problems even there ... see above "Skeptic's" column) kick in and we reject
out of hand any hint that God – at least any God worthy of our belief and worship – would
condone, let alone command, genocide.

Fair enough … I share that revulsion, in fact. But this begs a little giant of a question: Why?
That is to say: in any confrontation between a monstrosity of a biblical text like I Samuel 15
with our contemporary moral sensibilities, why must the latter prevail, be granted
preference? Because, as good chardonnay-swilling, Obama-/Hillary-voting, marriage-equality-
supporting, pro-gun-control progressives, we are opposed to genocide as a human-rights matter,
per the lights of our Enlightenment-trained rational faculties? But, of course, not everyone
agrees. I have had any number of conversations with conservative Christians – not all

25
fundamentalists – who condone the genocide of the Amalekites, either as an interpretation of the
parable or as a matter of actual historical fact. Without exception, the latter are personally and
individually revolted by the story, but they are willing to grant God a “pass” because God is …
well … God. Just as Kierkegaard was willing to entertain the suspension of ethical norms in the
case of the “knight of faith,” they are likewise and to an even greater degree willing to suspend
ethical norms when the ethical agent is God Godself.

And I think the reason is not far to seek. To a far greater degree than chardonnay-swilling,
Obama-/Hillary-voting … etc. … people like me, and many of you who read this column, my
conservative Christian friends have a greater (more or less intuitive) appreciation for the
consequences that must eventuate from an unrestrained extrapolation of a purely rationalistic
moral critique of such transgressive biblical narratives as I Samuel 15 (or the Annunciation or
the Crucifixion … etc.). They may never use the term, but on a visceral level, their theology is
founded on the bedrock of God-as-ganz-andere (“wholly other”). This German phrase is
something progressive, farther-left religious believers bandy about, also, but on a much more
cerebral, much more purely academic – and much less visceral – level. With them, also, God is
ganz andere … but only, as it were, in principle. By contrast, my conservative friends recognize
that, once we concede that God is ganz andere on the level of the glands and the amygdala, not
just the prefrontal cortex, then two consequences ensue: (a) we cannot indiscriminately apply a
reason-based critique of biblical theology (in either Testament) and consequently (b) there is no
a priori reason why God cannot, e.g., order genocide against any given people … or rape a
virgin … or kill God’s own Son. Precisely because God is "wholly other," all bets are off. If,
as Kierkegaard argued, a merely human "knight of faith" cannot be judged by rationally and
sociologically grounded ethical principles, how much less is God subject to those judgments!
Reason is often relevant but seldom dispositive. Because God is ganz andere, God is like the
singularity at the center of the event horizon. Just as spacetime warps at the center of a black
hole, so do ethical criteria when the Subject under consideration is God. The usual and
customary rules are out the window: some moral principles may be applicable; others not; and
all we know is that we have no way of distinguishing one case from the other.

One more level down, and the reason for this is also not far to seek: the alternative is atheism in
slow motion. Voltaire once said that, if triangles believed in a god, the god of triangles would be
three-sided. By subjecting the theological parables of the biblical text to a rationalistic,
Enlightenment-informed, science-centric critique, we are insisting that God – gradually over
extended historical periods – assume a form congruent with and congenial to our human
conceptual categories. We are revolted by genocide, therefore God must also be so. We are
insisting that, because we are triangles, our God must perforce be … well … the Great Triangle.
Persist in this long enough, argue conservatives, and God becomes a theological Cheshire
Cat: the "God-ness" of God -- God's "ganz-andere-ness" -- gradually fades away, and all we are
left with is the Cheshire-Cat-like smile of a purely formal theology: not the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, but, as Archibald MacLeish said in JB, "God the boiling point of water".
Something like this must be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge meant when he said that the average
Englishman’s conception of God was “as of an immense Clergyman”. And the only way to
prevent God from snowballing into Coleridge's "immense Clergyman" is to take with unqualified
seriousness God-as-ganz-andere per Isaiah 55:9. But that means refusing to dismiss out of hand
the possibility that God may, at times, act in ways we would consider flagrantly immoral.

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Now, I happily concede that what follows may be deeply unfair. I want to own that up front.
Certainly there is an element of the subjective in the following. I mention it only because, even
when I was an orthodox, church-going Christian, I had the following discomfiting
perception. But the impression persists in my own mind that, when people attempt to apply a
rationalistic, Enlightenment-centric critique to biblical texts, and especially when they do so in
such a way as to "domesticate" those texts and thereby render them consistent with such a
rationalistic world-view, they are, in reality and in a manner perhaps even they themselves are
not necessarily conscious of, attempting to preserve belief in God, not discover deeper insights
into God's actual character. In that regard, people who engage in this kind of critique are
practicing a theological analogue of Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatism, as described in his
long essay "The Fixation of Belief": they are attempting to "fixate" belief, even if only for
themselves, not necessarily to elucidate the nature and character of God. They want to preserve
belief in God, even in the face of allegations of God's advocacy of, e.g., genocide, rather like a
loyal wife who finds lipstick and the aroma of a foreign perfume on her husband's shirt -- but
nevertheless insists that her husband is faithful to her. Or the die-hard geocentric cosmologists in
the 17th century who, upon seeing the phases of Venus, nevertheless insisted "But dammit ... the
sun orbits the earth!".

Please understand: these remarks are entirely without rancor or censure. And perhaps most of
all without ridicule. We are all Titanic survivors floating in a freezing ocean, and we all -- your
Resident Skeptic no less than you -- need a piece of flotsam to cling to as much as Leonardo
DeCaprio and Kate Winslett. My flotsam is no better than yours. My concern, rather, is, not to
debunk your flotsam, but to give you permission -- which you certainly don't need from me ...
but to encourage you to give yourself permission -- to keep a light grip on your particular piece
of wreckage. Cling to it too tightly, and it may well disintegrate, leaving you alone in a vast
ocean like the lone sailor on the Andrea Gail at the end of The Perfect Storm. Lean on it too
insistently, and theology -- any theology -- will always disappoint.

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Chapter 9 – Elie Wiesel and the Trial of God
Of all the things that impressed me about the late Elie Wiesel – how strange the prefix “the late”
now sounds before his name! -- what always impressed me the most was his utter, unflinching,
and uncompromising honesty. There was apparently no question– about God or about human
beings, about good or about evil, about war or about peace – which he considered
unaskable. Likewise, and for essentially the same reason, there was seemingly no chain of
reasoning, no argument, no concatenation of inference that he shied away from following to its
uttermost conclusion. This moral and intellectual stamina even included such fraught issues as
those impinging on the Problem of Evil, understandably a subject of more than more than merely
academic importance to Elie Wiesel, given his status as a survivor of the death camps that were
the culmination of over 500 years of, not only German, but European fascism. European
Christendom simply has no comparable parallel to Wiesel’s unvarnished candor in both facing
the question squarely and answering it with – simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically -- both
skepticism and faith. Even those of us who cannot emulate him in the latter are no less admiring
of his courage and consistency in at least entertaining the possibility of the former.

Consider, as arguably most salient example of this paradox, the matter of the Trial of God. One
of the most persistent stories to emerge from World War II was that a small group of rabbis,
inmates imprisoned in Auschwitz, had staged a Trial of God to determine God’s responsibility
for the Shoah. Despite the persistence of stories about the Trial – we today would call it an
“urban legend” – there seemed to be no incontrovertible proof that such a Trial had actually been
convened … until, in September of 2008, at a dinner in London to raise funds for Holocaust
education, Elie Wiesel flatly declared "I was there when God was put on trial. … It happened at
night; there were just three people. At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than
‘guilty'. It means ‘[God] owes us something'. Then we went to pray." Wiesel even went on to
recast this story as a novel, set during the pogroms of the mid-17th century, The Trial of God. I
am aware of no better example of this paradox of faith and skepticism than pursuing what was
essentially a criminal proceeding against God, finding God in some sense or other complicit in
the crime … and then adjourning the court to pray to that same God. That Wiesel did both –
render a verdict of chayav and then pray to the Convicted – constitutes what to me is the greatest
imponderable of both his life and his work – and the greatest challenge, both to skeptics and to
people of faith – because both responses require a degree of lucidity and honesty seldom equaled
and never exceeded.

Now, to be sure, I have never read literally all the Christian literature about the Problem of Evil.
There may, for all I know, be examples of Christian writers and theologians who struggle with
the issue in a manner as unflinching as Wiesel’s treatment of the subject. But, despite having
read voluminously on the Problem of Evil over several decades, both on my own and as part of
theology classes, I have encountered nothing comparable. Least of all have I ever encountered
anything like Wiesel's theodical texts on the level of popular theology. The closest I have come
have been books like God in the Dock, a years-ago anthology of theodical essays compiled by C.
S. Lewis, and Philip Yancey’s Disappointment with God. (In British criminal trials, the “dock” is
the telephone-booth-sized area in the courtroom, usually bounded by a rail, where the accused
stands during the proceedings.) Both books were typical of their genre in that, despite avowing
that their purpose was to present the case against God rigorously and impartially, almost from the

28
first page, one could sense that the concluding verdict, in both cases, was foregone: in the end,
God would be exonerated, and, if anything, the prosecution would be indicted for having argued
its case in the first place. In the end, there would be no verdict of chayav, least of all “Guilty as
charged”. The Lewis anthology and Yancey’s book are also typical in that one gets the sense
that they try ‘way, ‘way, ‘way too hard, and thereby set themselves up to be stationary, bull’s-
eye-marked targets for Occam’s Razor, because both authors are racing their respective theodical
engines to the red line in order to avoid a conclusion that would otherwise be immediately
obvious: that religious faith is “always already” culturally and historically – even linguistically -
- conditioned, and lacking in any means of independent assessment.

And the reason they have to try that hard – and I think the source of their dissimilarity with Elie
Wiesel – is because Lewis, Yancey, & Co., on the one hand, and Wiesel, on the other, are doing
generically different things. The former are doing Christian apologetics: for reasons, one
suspects, having to do with a more or less implicit belief that the specifically Christian revelation
is, in some sense, uniquely truthful, they are irrevocably committed to a certain fairly specific
body of doctrines about Jesus, about human history, about life and death, etc., etc. Note, then,
that Christian apologetics is always defensive. Certain doctrines, certain teachings, certain
values, certain priorities, certain ideas need defending, because those doctrines, teachings, ideas,
etc. – i.e., that specifically Christian doctrines, teachings, and ideas -- are inevitably threatened
by the existence of alternatives. Elie Wiesel was no less committed to defending certain no-less-
specific doctrines, teachings, and ideas that are no less susceptible to being threatened. But the
doctrines, teachings, and ideas that Wiesel was committed to defending were doctrines,
teachings, and ideas that were universal in the sense of cutting across all lines of culture, class,
ethnicity, ideology, and religion: the dignity of all humans, the value of compassion, respect for
the viewpoints of those who are different, and a willingness to sound an alarm when any of those
values are threatened by authoritarian religious and political structures. Of course, C. S. Lewis,
Philip Yancey, et al., are no less committed to these values and principles, but they insist that, at
the end of the day, the defining terms have to be phrased in the conceptual idiom of Christian
theology and eschatology. But Elie Wiesel, even though no less a Jew than Lewis and Yancey
were Christians, did not allow his religious heritage to monopolize the definitions of the terms
that were his primary and defining commitment. Elie Wiesel was both a religiously committed
man and a humanist, rather in the tradition of Gandhi: no less one for being the other.

At the end of the day, I think Wiesel's moral, intellectual, and artistic greatness -- no other word
will do -- consists in the confluence of Wiesel's personal integrity, with the willingness of the
Jewish tradition itself to accommodate the kind of intimately personal struggle, the agon in the
archaic Greek sense, that accompanies that deep integrity. Wiesel did not flinch from accusing,
railing against, ranting against his God, the Hebrew God when such was warranted by either that
God's actions or that God's lack thereof:

Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because
He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria
working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He
had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say
to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to
be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the

29
furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?
(from Night)

This attitude escapes the charge of hubristic arrogance only because (1) it is mirrored in a
willingness to question and to critique oneself

The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was
only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in mid-air, the other side of the window. Fear
caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. The face was my own. (from
Dawn)

and (2) because of the precedent set in the Tanakh and Talmudic literature by characters of no
less stature than Moses and Abraham and Rabbi Akiva all of whom themselves had the audacity
to question God ... in a certain nuanced sense as an Equal. (This audacity of questioning God as,
in a way, an Equal is also a strand of Jewish discourse that has become especially prominent
since the Shoah: the tradition of "protest theology". Doing justice to this tradition would distract
us from the subject at hand. So suffice to say that I recommend reading Jewish "protest"
theologians like David Blumenthal, Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Zachary
Braiterman. Again, there is no Christian equivalent.) Perhaps without intending to, Wiesel
captured this uniquely and radically transactional and -- I think it's safe to say -- Judaic
relationship with God at one point in the great novel The Gates of the Forest.

What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his,
and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him who you can hold your
tongue without shame and talk freely without risk. That's it.

That is indeed "it": to Moses, Abraham, Rabbi Akiva, the Baal Shem Tov, Reb Menachem
Mendl of Kotzk, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel -- Elie Wiesel -- and all the great tzaddikim of
the Jewish tradition, God is indeed a Friend in this deep, mature, and fully articulated sense.
Job's wife advised her husband "Curse God and die". They testify that one can do the former, yet
without incurring the latter. There is nothing -- I say this without qualification -- nothing
comparable in the Christian tradition. So, e.g., C. S. Lewis and Philip Yancey say to God "Thy
will be done". (Think of the conclusion of Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.) But, in
addition, with Judaism, Abraham and Elie Wiesel can, without stepping outside the historic
stream of Judaism, also say "Thy will be changed". That Wiesel did so, and did so with such
virtuosity and consistency, is a tribute to both his faithfulness toward the Tradition and to the
Tradition's faithfulness toward him.

So my concluding benediction to Elie Wiesel is the same as the words which conclude Miguel
De Unamuno's book The Tragic Sense of Life: "May God deny you peace but give you glory".

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Chapter 10 – Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Enlightenment
I suppose there are still people around here and there who complain about the creeping
secularism of the Holidays and who in consequence admonish others to “keep Christ in
Christmas”. I well remember such exhortations from the time of my childhood, growing up in
Wichita, KS. Such hortatory rituals were often accompanied by carols, religious services, and – I
would argue, curiously enough – by a reading of Charles Dickens’ perennial A Christmas Carol.
I say “curiously enough” because I have just finished reading Carol for the few-hundredth time
and for the first time, I noticed the absence of Christ in Carol, except in a very "thin", allusive
sense. Carol without Christ, or with Christ in the background of the background, is a much more
universal, even “archetypal”, story of the awakening of a man’s conscience through the
awakening of his consciousness. Separating Christ from Dickens’s classic narrative results in a
story remarkably like that of the Buddha under the bo tree, of the farmer in the Ten Ox-Herding
Pictures, the story St. Paul tells of kenosis in Philippians 2:7, of what happened to Thomas
Merton on a street corner in Louisville, KY, in 1958. Carol even shares many of the semiotic
motifs of those other stories, not as specifically Christian conventions, but as universal narrative
patterns.

Perhaps the most obvious “trans-Christian” motif is the pattern of kenosis: the down-then-up
archetype St. Paul uses to describe Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection in Philippians chap. 2.
This corresponds to the Buddha’s grim discovery of the universality of suffering, followed by his
enlightenment; to Muhammad’s time in the darkness of the Cave of Hira, where he received the
Qur’an, followed by his return to Mecca and the proclamation of Allah's message; the
impoverishment of a beggar, as the lifestyle Hindu mystics are expected to assume as part of
their quest for moksha; etc., etc., etc. (The down-and-up pattern of kenosis can also be an inward-
and-outward pattern, something Elizabeth O’Connor writes of movingly in Journey Inward,
Journey Outward.) I believe the fairest way to read Carol is to read it so that the story of Christ
becomes, not unique and therefore historically abnormal, but as a part of the archetypal pageant
of spiritual individuation of which all great religions and their Teachers partake.

Like all such journeys, the kenotic descent begins with death, literal or figurative. Carol begins
with a literal death: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. …
Old Marley was as dead as a door nail”. Gautama Siddhartha’s journey to enlightenment was
initiated, among other causes, by his encounter with a cadaver. My father-in-law’s funeral was
another such occasion. Scrooge becomes sensitized to the death involved in the experience of
kenosis by being forced to contemplate the kenotic experience of others, courtesy of all his
ghostly preceptors, beginning when Jacob Marley’s shade shares with Scrooge the vision of
revenant spirits who yearn to change others' circumstances that, because of the intervention of
death, it is now too late for the dead to alter. Hence his experience of Marley’s death. Hence
later, also, Scrooge’s tremulous question to the Ghost of Christmas Present: “’Spirit … tell me if
Tiny Tim will live.’ ‘I see a vacant seat … in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an
owner, carefully preserved … “ Of course, the climactic moment is Scrooge’s prevenient
experience of his own mortality under the tutelage of the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Scrooge
crept toward [the headstone], trembling as he went, and … read upon the stone of the neglected
grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge”. Virtually all religious traditions insist, in different

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ways and speaking different dialects, that all being is being-toward-Death, and the first step in
the individuation of anyone, Christian or non-, is to squarely face this brute fact.

But perhaps the most significant element of Scrooge’s experience of kenosis is not only death –
but also life, Scrooge’s life. What Scrooge lacks is context, and the reason he does not have
context is because, at various points in his life beginning with young boyhood, Scrooge ceased to
pay attention. Scrooge stopped seeing. In particular, Scrooge stopped seeing that which was
right in front of him, that which was hidden because it was so obvious – hidden in plain
sight. He forgot to see the emotional impoverishment visited upon him in his boyhood by a cold
and distant father, and also the rejuvenation he experienced when his sister invited him home for
the Holidays and to a renewed home life. He forgot to see how joyously his previous employer,
Mr. Fezziwig, greeted Christmas, and how profligately Mr. Fezziwig spent money to enable his
household and his employees – Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, not least! – to celebrate. He forgot to see
how his ex-fiancee had been, as she herself said, displaced in his affections by his subsequent
love of money and gain. The greatest lesson I ever received in how to see my in-law family was
my sudden kensho-like experience after my father-in-law’s memorial service in 2008. I had never
had in-law troubles. I always felt welcomed. But after that memorial service, they seemed to
“stand in glory, shine like stars, appareled in a light serene,” not because I was seeing them as
more than they were, but because I now saw them just as they were. And I see them that way to
this day. Likewise, thanks to the intervention of his ghostly interlocutors, Scrooge begins to see
again.

What he sees is, yes, the impoverishment of others, e.g., the Children of Want and Ignorance
hidden in the folds of Present Christmas’s robe – but the reason he can now see this is because he
now sees his own impoverishment of spirit. So Scrooge is able to begin to grant himself that
which, even when he was not aware of it, he most needed from others: forgiveness. Some of the
wisest words C. G. Jung ever wrote occur in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole
outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name
of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that
I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all
the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are
within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the
enemy who must be loved -- what then?

And it all begins, as it began with Scrooge, by learning to see again. Nor is this unique to
Christianity, nor is the teaching about the necessity of learning to see unique to Christ. On the
contrary, vast tracts of all religions, “major” and “minor”, are oriented toward disciplines that
enable us to see what is in front of us – to see it again. "We walk by faith and not by sight" is just
true enough to be misleading.

To be “born again” is to learn to see again.

It is when Scrooge learns -- or begins to learn -- to see again that the upward trajectory of his
kenosis -- Scrooge's resurrection, if you will -- begins. Buddha sees that the central problem of

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human existence is the dynamic of suffering, attachment, and the tendency to enter a vicious
circle by attempting to use the latter to palliate the former. It is no accident that the blind
Bartimaeus cried out to Jesus on the Jericho Road "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me," and
that when Jesus asked what Bartimaeus needed, Bartimaeus replied "Lord, I want to see
again". (Perhaps the most exquisitely revelatory aspect of the Bartimaeus pericope is that
Bartimaeus's name, half Hebrew ["bar"] and half Greek ["Timaeus"], translates to "son of honor"
or "honored son".) That scales fell from Paul's eyes after his Damascus Road enlightenment is to
be expected. This, in a thousand diverse dialects, is the Cry of the human heart: to see
(again). The essential task of individuation -- or enlightenment or kensho or satori or moksha ...
call it what you will -- is to see that which is hidden in plain sight in front of us.

When Scrooge begins to see again, "old things are passed away, all things are become new". I
make bold to assert: this is the universal experience of all and any who attain, or even feebly
glimpse, enlightenment. It is an experience of radical kinship based on the conviction that we
share a common mortality, a common inheritance of contingency, and a common kinship with
others. With Scrooge, this takes the form of a newly found and exuberant generosity toward
others, a passion to mend injuries from the past and to assist those he has hurt to a better
future. The charm he now sees in the schoolboy he sends for the goose was always there. The
difference is that now he can see it. The decency he senses in Bob Cratchit was always there.
The difference is that now he can appreciate it. The esteem of his nephew was always there. The
difference is that now he can value it. The poor and indigent were always in dire straits, at
Christmas and otherwise. The difference is that now he cares.

All because Scrooge has learned -- and is learning -- to see.

There is nothing specific to Christianity in any of this. In fact, there is even nothing specific to
religion in any of this. The title of A Christmas Carol notwithstanding, it is possible, without
doing violence to the narrative, to see Carol as essentially secular. It is a story of just common
human decency.

In any case, Merry Christmas to y'all, and, as one French playwright said to the other, May the
farce be with you!

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