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| Contemporary Religion 101 |
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| Hold on the Cancer Cure, Big Guy; It's Fourth and Short and the Game's On The Line |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, May 05, 1999. When I was in high school, back in the old days, back in the real old days when men were men and black people weren't yet. Back when real men knew there was a difference and an important difference between a frappe, a cabinet, and a milkshake. Back when Duane Eddy called attention to the fact that the thick strings could be played, waaaaaaayyyyyy back then, I took a class in contemporary religion. Or philosophy. Something. Anyway, this class partially concerned itself with the French Philosophes, who were the brain trust of the Enlightenment, and how they began to humanize God, and give him the virtues they thought he should have, which was different from the previous millennia, where God solemnly told us the virtues we would have - or else. Are you with me so far? Have a sip of my cabinet. That's too much. Buy your own. Okay, anyway, these guys reworked and reinterpreted the holy texts until it was clearly revealed that God was, in fact, pretty much in accord with what the French Philosophes were, and, in fact, was pretty much identical to them. Not a real god, but god like, with high intelligence, and a biting sense of humor, and didn't need girls, although may have desired them, which was good news to Rousseau who made up stories of giving his children away and all that although nobody else apparently ever saw him with a woman despite his own intricate façade and written fiction passed off as autobiography. Reading the Philosophes sometimes propels you ahead to Hugh Hefner: What sort of Deity Reads Montiesque? A Humane sage with a passion for the juice of French grapes and the women who make them…. In short, God was reined in and brought into the stable, got with the program, made into a team player, and re-released to find his own personal destiny, which, oddly, bore a strange resemblance to that of Voltaire. Hey, do unto others as they alone can do unto you, capiche? Anno 1755. Anno 1999. I turn on the television and amidst all the horror of an Oklahoma shredded by a three hundred mile an hour tornado, half a mile wide, on the ground for hours, where pickup trucks are bent in two around the foundations of vanished houses, children are crying for suddenly missing parents, I am confronted with the earnest face and faith of a professional athlete. His life, he warns, was nothing. The millions of dollars, the women, the adulation. As dust. He may have tried drugs, alcohol, demon tobacco; the script is unclear. All we need to know we are told. His life was an empty, echoing chamber. Until he established his personal relationship with God, life really sucked round the old homestead. Now, with a child or twelve and a wife to cross-examine him about life on the road, he has found fulfillment, and happiness, and destiny. He has a personal relationship with God. My personal feeling is that these guys are simply grateful they're not in jail, and that a shred of conscience foamed down their anger at a crucial point and they didn't take a swing at the ref. God, unfortunately, no longer returns my calls - it’s a social thing - and so I cannot query him/her/flaming foliage what the appreciation for this relationship might be on the other end. Is it possible eternity just simply bit until he established a personal relationship with Randy White? I suspect God enjoys listening to the travails of overpaid idiots, however athletic, much as I do listening to Howard Stern or Rush Limbaugh. He reaches for the remote but finds there is nothing else on. Every bended knee in the universe is whining about some personal inconvenience they think is a horror. Except children, of course. Their fears are real, their ignorance charming, their wonder intoxicating, even after a million years. But the prayers of athletes. Think they use up their divine phone card asking for world peace, mental health, a gentler life? Naw. Help me win this game. Help me do well. Help me, period, in this exercise of futility and unimportance except for the summertime diversion and the wintertime recollections of a ballfield. Despite tornado, war, devastation, murder, and torture, pay attention to me in my health, happiness, profession, even if it is at the expense of those who need you. Come on God, be a bro and help us win. Is such a God worthy of worship? They think he is, and that he responds, and that is how they see themselves. God, of course, isn't like that. Or would not be like that if I believed he, she, oddly-shaped-tortilla really existed. God, of course, is like me, laughing at them, our feet up on the porch with our strawberry frappe in a gentle summer evening, emoting for the ages. It's best, of course, this way. |
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