One of my favorite short stories is Honore de Balzac's "The Atheist's Mass," though my own boxing matches with God, owing to my exceptionally short arms, have been painfully one-sided and less than successful.
Voltaire suggested 'if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him,' though if your beliefs waver or fluctuate I can see how you'd flip that quote on its head without breaking a sweat.
Meanwhile, as headlines remind us every day, we have murderous morons who have managed to misinterpret holy writings of all the major religions of the world to buttress their own mutton-headed and muddled vision of a divinity where everyone else is wrong and deserving of punishment.
Added to that, we have the politics of the expedient that have the men and women in power creating additional differences and distinctions between and among us because political power multiplies when you learn to divide us into smaller and smaller subsets.
I'm sixty-four and spend more and more time, for pragmatic and actuarial reasons, pondering a lot of the wondrous, and many of the less so, ways of this life and worrying about what's over the next hill. As Yogi Berra once observed, "it gets late early around here," and more so with every passing day, so I'm starting to pay a lot more attention.
I'm not sure I'd want to spend time (much less all eternity) in the presence of a divinity who created us in Her/His image and likeness and then left us here to our own devices, or one who is an aloof abstraction watching indifferently as we wage war on one another for what we perceive Her/Him to be.
I keep hoping for a sign of some kind to help me on my way and might even settle for a picture postcard from the other side, even with postage due.
-bill kenny
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