Religion’s smart-people problem:

[Sweeney]

33. You know

Last edited Sat Dec 27, 2014, 02:37 PM - Edit history (3)

I have rebuilt transmissions, engines, carburetors, and can do almost anything on a house. I never think I am really smart until I meet some one really stupid. If I try to count all of the skills I have, I can never include people skills; Still, who has the magical power to know what is in another person's mind?.

Other than music, and perhaps dance, we only have language, and like that television doctor: House says. Everyone lies.

I don't lie because I don't count because I don't care. I have seen the most intelligent man I ever actually knew, an uncle by marriage, a PHD physicist and head of the Nat Sci department at MSU- go to church regularly. He was a good guy. I never asked him what he made of God with all of his intellectual ability. I made little of God with my little ability and maybe God made me little with Her ability.

I feel my intellectual abilities so long neglected out of necessity- that I give my mind all it can handle. My uncle had such a varied collection of spy novels that I wonder if the government wasn't paying him to read them. In my reading when I started reading physics, he pointed out some books I could read, and helped me if I had questions. Much of it was good, yet not necessarily up to date; and still in its way, relevant. Try to imagine how much scientists were doing over a hundred years ago when the rest of the world was in nearly a stone age. Do you think such people grasping the grandness of knowledge and the beauty of science could ever seriously doubt a God?

It is not the intelligent and well who doubt in a God even if they practice no organized religion. It is the hurt, the heartbroken, and the injured who doubt in God, because God has been cruel to them. I will tell you a secret, and any one who gives a shet. I once witnessed a miracle.

One night, my mother lite blessed candles and I joined her in prayer while my little brother slept, and my older brother for whom the miracle was prayed joined in. As we prayed the rosary, my mother stopped and rubbed blessed water on my brother's spindly legs, crippled with Polio. And she always asked for God to do his will and not hers and this was the perfect prayer, because God did just that.

And this prayer of acceptance, my brother heard too, and was granted resignation. But I was cured, and maybe my mother should have been more specific, and maybe I should have been more grateful; but I was cured, and I saw in my youth a ritual of faith and promise and sacrifice and prayer played out as it has been played out for well over a thousand years, and I realized what a miracle is faith when every card in the universe seems stacked against you.

Life at times can seem such futility. Life throws at us heartbreaks uncounted until they kill us. Little man monkeys that we are, we often stand up to it well and with a good heart. If you never ask God for nothing you will never be disappointed. If you get in a desperate situation, Pray. If prayer has no effect; Die. If you survive, testify; because that is what survivors always do. It does not mean they're prayers were more worthy or their faith more dear. It means they survived, and some day they won't, and then, I hope they can meet death with good cheer.

God, or for your benefit; If there is a God; she is no piss ant. Consider the vastness of the universe. As the universe has grown, so has God's distance from us. We used to be able to reach heaven with a bean stalk, or a ladder. Now you can't go there any more short of being free of the flesh. What's the rush. Because from the perspective of this sinner, those who deny their own flesh and their own life deny all life and all flesh. It makes such people miserable and righteous

I have this body not as a testimony to God when I am saved; but when I am cursed. When I can see the wonder of this life even through the haze of my own pain and misery, I am yet well. And I think this is true of intelligent people, that they can be grateful for life even if they do not know who to be grateful to. God is too big for the trivial shet of churches. I am a member of the one true faith and it seems so much nonsense. If a person in poverty asks me for help, I give what I can, not because of who he is but because of who I am.

If some one needs to believe, and they need the comfort and support of community why would I deny them that. It is one thing to deny to Christians the privilege of interference in politics; but who should deny them what they need. I would not deny a rummy rum. I would not deny a druggy drugs; but no one will ever get enough for a fatal dose from me.

If you need to escape this life, the pain, the strife, the loneliness of life who am I to deny. If religion is your strength, I want you strong. If reality is your strength ,I want you strong. We all pay for our lives with our lives. and this is true for rich or poor, those who live a hundred years or only seconds.

Religion does not work for you. Religion does not make sense to you. If it did not answer normal human needs it would be worth little to humanity. I don't buy into religion for a moment, and yet in that word: Firmament the result of power, you have it all. Only acknowledge how large is the cosmos and how small are we. Do not be like the religious and make God small to make yourself large.

Be what you are, and not as you feel you have been forced to be. Live life active, and not reactive. Do not live contra Christianity. Forget all religions and answer the question: Who made this, What made this; and understand that you will never know. Nothing is fore ordained but human ignorance, and for every wisp of knowledge we must be thankful. Will you thank the man that learned some new knowledge when he was thanking God?. What if we made God and God did not make us. Should the fact that we have no address to send a thank you card stop us from feeling grateful. What reason have you to feel otherwise?