shaking the foundations of my faith

My life is changing in big ways right now. I'm leaving my job on Friday, and will be leaving my adopted city of Minneapolis for the drizzly city of Seattle at the end of September. And all of this for the love of a woman.

Which leads me to the 'faith' part.

I have long required that god give me some type of empirical evidence of his existence before I believe. No "mysterious ways," proxies sent from heaven to die for my sins, or images of the holy mother baked into pastries will do. I want evidence, and I want it delivered in person. No exceptions.

Then I met this woman. She's perfect in every conceivable way. She's beautiful, smart, and witty. There's always a hint of mischief in her eyes, and she can talk on all manner of high-minded and serious topics without achieving any level of actual seriousness, all the while relishing a can of cheap domestic beer. And she likes my cats.

It's as if someone made her with me in mind.

That we even met is a miracle in itself. Remove any single event from a long line of circumstances going back to about 1972 and I never meet this woman. I was stood up by a date to a friend's wedding in April. She was in town from Seattle for the wedding. I didn't know anybody who wasn't in the wedding party, so I parked myself by the bar and enjoyed several glasses of wine. She introduced herself to me at the bar, and we never looked back. Had my date not flaked out on me, I wouldn't be writing this. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Seriously. I haven't done the math, but I'd bet it's a statistical impossibility that we met.

And that makes me wonder.

I will never meet a person like this again, I'm certain of that. That a random series of events managed to bring us together doesn't do it justice. Things this perfect can't happen by accident. I can't believe that two people so suited for one another can be separated by 1,600 miles of circumstances and just randomly bump into each other and fall in love. There must be some kind of design . . . some kind of interested party pulling strings and pushing buttons . . .

I guess there was The Kaiser and John, who told me repeatedly that I would fall madly in love with this woman if only I could meet her. And Alissa, who probably invited me to the wedding with the expressed purpose of introducing us. And the open bar, which the two of us naturally gravitated toward at the wedding. I'm thinking the bar had the biggest hand in it.

So, nice try, god, but it's not good enough. I still need a personal appearance, preferrably with two forms of government issued photo I.D.

Wow. Two comments already.
It's like a party.

I've not read more than The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. It's something I suppose I should correct sooner rather than later. Thank you for the recommendation. I'll write about it when I read it, I'm sure.

While we're quoting scripture, I'll share my favorite verse:

(KJV) Deuteronomy 23:1: He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off shall not enter into the kingdom of the Lord.

That's right fellas, mind your nuts or you might not get into heaven.

I also like the part where the jewish carpenter gets pissed off and casts the money-changers out of the temple of god. Kind of inspiring.

the holy writ of the church of ennui

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?" --Epicurus


I can't pinpoint when I became completely comfortable living without a god, but I know my descent into unabashed atheism started when I was a young boy. I would often lay in bed at night terrified that there was no heaven, no hell, and no purgatory. That there was no afterlife; just ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The end.

My childhood agnosticism festered in my soul until high school, where I discovered the serviceable, but ultimately pointless, waypoint known as Deism. From there, it was a short, effortless hop to godlessness.

My parents are lapsed Catholics, and never took their children to church. Not even at Christmas and Easter. My religious upbringing consisted of whatever I could glean from various sources, like Sunday afernoon movies on television, my grandparents, and the general, underlying Christianity of American culture. Somewhere along the way, I was instilled with a belief in God, but maintained a poor knowledge of the Bible he lived in.

A friend from the neighborhood once invited my sister and me to his church youth group that played dodgeball and talked about Jesus on Wednesday nights. We'd sit through a felt-board lesson about Jesus, then go throw balls at each other for a half an hour on the playground. After dodgeball, we went back inside for graham crackers, milk, and more Jesus-talk. It was like school, but stupid, so we quit going after two weeks.

By seven years old, I had already decided Jesus was not my answer. It wasn't anything in particular about him that turned me off (though his vengeful behavior toward a barren fig tree struck me as odd), but his most vocal followers just plain creeped me out. Even those whom I considered friends.

"If the Bible is true," I asked Nathan, "How come there's no dinosaurs in it?"

"Because they came before," he replied, cooly.

"Before God?"

"No! Before the Bible," a little less cool.

"God came before the Bible, too," I replied, "But he's in it. So how come he left out the dinosaurs?"

"Just because!" he answered with a dissmissive wave and a groan.

I knew that answer all too well. It was the same answer my mom gave me when I asked why I wasn't allowed to swear, or drink beer, or smoke cigarettes. It was the answer she gave when she just didn't want to bother explaining. It's an easy out for authority, but it didn't jibe coming from a follower. Unlike my mother, he wanted to explain, he simply couldn't. So he dismissed the question. Problem solved!


But, somehow, I held on to a belief in God above.


In high school, I found Deism in the writings of the Founders of the United States, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Here was the exact theology I'd been tossing around in my brain for years spelled out and laid bare by the greatest thinkers of the time. It was simple, it was elegant. It allowed me to believe in a Creator without having to sit through all the Jesus mumbo-jumbo, and without worrying if God was pissed because I like bacon. It allowed me to have a faith without having to have any faith. It was my very own "Just because." Perhaps I couldn't prove God's existence, but nor could I prove his non-existence. Suddenly, I was able to cast my agnosticism into the back of my head and feel secure that some Creator somewhere didn't really give a shit what I was up to. Perfect.

Years passed before the next time I thought seriously about God, and I realized I didn't care if he existed anymore. Years of neglect in the recesses of my mind left him worn and useless; more impotent than omnipotent. In the end it really wasn't much of a descent into atheism at all, God just sort of faded away, like so many old friends. I still can't prove he doesn't exist, but it's not my job to do so anymore, it's his to prove he does. I am an atheist.

And I no longer lay awake nights worrying about the afterlife. The nowlife gives me plenty to worry about.


"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." --Thomas Jefferson