Comfortably Zoned with Ralph Zig Tyko

Faith Questioned

February 29, 2008 at 11:30 am (Family & Friends)

I received this email from my very close friend, Andrew Dósa:

“Let me know what you think. It is put together with a bit of contrivance (like so much literature) but I think it captures a lot of what we talked about, and some of my other thoughts. If you dislike some of it or know how it could be improved, and you have the time to share with me, please tell me. If it sounds patronizing or condescending, let me know. That would bother me.”

It was one of those typical conversations with my friend. We started off talking about something important. Then we both diverged to our comedy routines. We worked over each other as if we were performing and challenging and correcting each other. Our ideas ricocheted off each other and went back and forth with puns, word plays, intentional malaprops, and one-up-manship.

Somehow we managed to get back on track. After a short time, however, our conversation took another interesting turn. It is still not clear how we managed to move in this new direction. I made a harmless comment, one of the typically noncontroversial things that fly out of my mouth.

“There is no such thing as an atheist.”

My friend raised his eyebrows. They would have gone higher except his facial skin wouldn’t stretch more. He quickly added his verbal dissent. His family was not religious. His father’s family particularly had suffered much. His father escaped death in a Nazi concentration camp, unlike his father’s mother, sister and brother, and several other members of the family who died there. My friend was not an atheist, but close–he was an “aggressive agnostic.”

His father never talked about the details of his early years, or the loss of sister, brother and mother. But hardship and deprivation were hallmarks of his life. His father wondered about God. If God was loving, how could he allow pain and injustice to be so real, close and common, and take such an intimate raw toll on us humans? If God was active and involved, why did he not stop the carnage and searing emotional pain? If God was just, how could evil and injustice be so blatant or insidious, and successful? Could there be a good God? His father was, in the words of my friend, an “orthodox atheist.”
In a calm and collected manner, my friend described what he learned from and about his father. There was no catch in his voice. His tone was moderated. As an animated man, with a lively, irreverent, and funky sense of humor and personality, my friend was detached. The detachment covered his own emotional and intelligent questions. I suspected he had his own pain and was touched by the pain and suffering of his father and family. And he shared with his father that strong nagging doubt about God.
His words struck me. With sadness in my own soul, I let those words fill the space in my office and have their due respect.

After a few moments, I began, “There are some responses to your father’s and your doubts. But one thing needs to be clear. Nothing I say can take away from your father’s suffering and your family’s suffering, and nothing I say is intended to minimize in anyway what they endured or the evil that was done.” I paused to let the force of those words have their intended import. After that second short silence inhabited the room, I forged ahead.

“We have to begin by assuming God exists, is loving and merciful, righteous and just, and he wants his children, this creation, you and me and everybody else, to be loving and merciful, righteous and just. God wants us to be at peace and to have joy, deep seated at-our-core joy. Your father began with that premise. All of creation begins with a sense, belief, or idea that God exists and he is good. After experiencing and being scarred by that evil, your father concluded this was evidence to undermine his understanding that a good God existed, or if God did exist, He wouldn’t be very good or loving or have our well-being at the forefront of his actions and designs.”

“There are at least three possibilities about God. First, he could be the Deists’ God, who, shaking the world in his giant hand, as if it were a collection of dice, let it roll onto the table and unfold as it might. After that, this God went on permanent vacation, rendering Himself a non-entity as far as our world is concerned.

“We might be disappointed with this God, that he started off so powerfully (creating a beautiful planet and humans, who are beautiful too) and finished so weakly (as if he were an absentee landlord, slum lord, or completely apathetic).”

“So if God is this way, being angry with him would not amount to much. He does not answer prayers and he may not care anymore. We should be fatalistic and figure out how to get by on our own.”

“On the other side of the spectrum, our second God has fingerprints on everything. In His world, there would be no evil. God makes sure we are not disappointed or suffer in any way. God would simply keep us all from doing any harm or bad. God would make us do only good things. We are or become sock puppets or the ventriloquist’s dummy, and simply “obey”. Like the subjects of Stanley Milgram’s study, we do what we are told–or are forced to do.”

“Is that a God you and your father would want? We humans, at our best, may intend to do good–and occasionally succeed. But every conceivable error or mistake or harm that we do, could never unfold–God would automatically protect us and everyone from the harmful consequences of our choices. So much for free will. So much for thinking. Could we even exist as sentient creatures? How could we even exist as separate from God?”
A variety of other thoughts came to my mind. Would we, with that controlling God, perpetually be a pre-Oz amalgam of Dorothy’s three friends? Or God’s tin soldiers set in parade formation to look clean and orderly to the viewing stand? With that God, how could we ever be complete, or at best, how could we be anything except grossly incomplete? We would be products of God’s factory, with God as an automation engineer designing us to factory specifications. That was a chilling thought, but perhaps a story line for a Kubrick or Fellini flick–God the censor.

Without expressing those unsettling ideas, I continued: “A third possibility is that God is somewhere between those two contrasts. Like the second God, God is active and working in the lives of his creation. Sometimes he protects us from ourselves, others from us, or us from others. God actively speaks and acts in this world. He teaches us, trains us, protects us, and disciplines us. But unlike that second God, he is not forcing us to be good with a constant controlling care.”

“This God also leaves us this earth to live on. He gives us this sphere of influence and authority. And he expects us to do something with that influence and authority.”
I looked at my friend: “You know what we do in that sphere. Sometimes we do well. We may love and sacrifice for our children. We might learn and grow and mature. We may even, on occasion, love our neighbors as ourselves. But we do a lot of harm. Some of us do unimaginable harm and evil. The power wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung was extraordinary. The evil committed by these spectacularly notorious men seems beyond human counting and measure. Some people estimate that 40 to 70 million people were killed by each of these men and the life suffocating regimes they created.”
“But even you and I do some measure of evil. It seems ‘small’ as evil, but the only real difference between small doses of evil we do and the gross evil those men did was merely opportunity or reach.”

Switching direction, I posed another question to my friend. “If there was this loving God, where would we be safest and freest, most joyful and most at peace?”
“Wouldn’t that be with Him? If we die, he might draw us to Himself. If God took your grandmother and aunt and uncle, He rescued them from who knows how much suffering. He blessed them by bringing an end to their suffering. He rescued them from the general suffering that comes with life on this sphere and the particular spectacular harm and suffering in the concentration camps.. If our life on earth was moments of breath or decades of breath, to be in heaven with Him would be immeasurably better than our life on earth. So how could we justify anger at God if he takes from us others–to give them the best safest place? Can you really be angry at God that he scooped up your grandmother and aunt and uncle from hideous suffering?
“Now there is another aspect to your father’s suffering. There is a ‘natural’ suffering when we ‘lose’ friends or family, even when we believe or know they may be better off.”
Here was another transition in our discussion.

“Your father suffered because he loved his family. Love allowed him to suffer. Would he rather keep that capacity for love and take that ‘natural’ suffering that comes with it? Or would he prefer to not have the capacity for love and be free of the suffering? Could you imagine his non-chalance at seeing those three precious lives snuffed out or the torture and death of so many more? He’d not even bother to shrug his shoulders as he turned away to calculate his own next steps. And ironically, if he did not have the capacity to love, we can’t be sure he’d even value (love) his own life. Would his own life mean anything to him?”

“We all suffer, and it has many sources. But most of them are striking blessings.”
As someone who always wants to deliver the verbal knockouts, I noted my friend was not dazzled, but he was allowing the ideas to percolate. But his thoughts seemed interrupted by this last statement. So I continued.

“I sometimes ask people if they ever wanted to see bruises on their children. No one has ever said yes. So I explained why I did want to see at least some bumps, scrapes, and bruising on my children. My children attempted to defy gravity, by standing and walking. Laboring to get off the ground, they wobbled, teetered, fell. But they kept trying. They made progress, with some price to pay. Their little knees, bottoms, arms and heads and shoulders took beatings, got bruised, scratched, swollen. Sometimes, pain is the result of growth–leaving behind the old, breaking through, reaching a new level.”
Now we moved to consider pain from another angle. “When my nephew was seven, he had been told many times about the dangers of the stove. The words translated to understanding for him, when he reached up and attempted to get a good grip on the hot coil of a stove top burner. The picture of those twin tracks of burn marks and swelling across his hand and fingers are seared in my memory–along with his desperate screams. We all just ran to him to help him, comfort him. His mother looked like she was in more pain than he was. No I-told-you-sos were needed. But he never grabbed a stove top coil again.”

“Contrast that to a person with leprosy. The damage to the nerve endings results in the loss of sensation, the loss of pain. If my nephew had leprosy, he would not have felt pain. But he could have lost fingers or his entire hand. The harm to him would have been profoundly worse from not feeling the pain. Pain seems a good thing in some situations.”
“Now, I confess, there is one perspective on or explanation for pain that is not ever entirely emotionally satisfying. That is the pain from injustice. If we see injustice, we also can see justice. It proves we know justice and it reflects our moral core. We naturally reject injustice and value fairness. Seeing injustice can inspire us–to live justly, take a stand against evil/injustice, and resist it, that it not enter in and wreak havoc. But it is unsettling to our core when evil and injustice seem to prevail–and cause such suffering and harm.”

My friend glanced (again) at his watch. I felt some pressure to cut short my pontificating and get to my last big idea. “Why do we expect to be free of pain? Nothing in life suggests the earth is or should be a suffer-free zone. Why do we demand that God shelter us from reality? Why do we demand to be untouched by life? It cannot be that any of us is free of wrong doing. If we were truly ‘righteous’ or ‘holy’ or ‘perfect,’ we would earn it or deserve it. But we do not have the moral integrity to demand a life without the unpleasantries. We are not entitled.

“Yet we go further. We blame God. We accuse Him–He has done us wrong. Yet We don’t understand the depths of his care or work for our benefit. We seem a bit immature and childish to expect everything we think we want. (That also begs the question of whether or not we really know what is best for ourselves in every situation. If you could ask a baby if it would rather stay in that wonderful womb or be born into this world, would it say it wanted the cold, the pressure, the pulling, the breathing, the crying, and all the rest? Yet if that baby got its way, the womb would become a tomb, and maybe mom would too.)”

“Now when we get that foolishness running at full steam, we then attack God’s character. How could he allow us to suffer? He is sadistic–He is the cosmic sadist. Then we take this extraordinary leap of faith and say he could not be good. Before too long a time of indulging these deprecations against God, we take another extraordinary leap of faith and say he might not even exist.”

I was on a roll, and completely dominating the conversation. I must have been causing him some pain, or, maybe the good spin is that he was learning endurance. But like so many good things, this talk had to come to an end. My friend jumped up and explained he had another commitment to get to. He explained: “Look at the time. Really, I must be off. I bought some new shampoo last week, and have looked forward to using it. I scheduled a shampoo this afternoon.” I think I would have been hurt if my friend had been telling me a line, but knowing him as an honest man, I was glad to have had at least some time with him to share my theories about pain.

If that shampoo had not gotten in our way, he would have heard about other forms of pain we suffer:

• Pain and guilt from getting caught after doing something wrong or unjust (the hand in the cookie jar pain);
• Pain from mistakes (I once changed my car’s transmission oil by drained the engine oil–who knew there were two large drain bolts under a car–causing a very great pain in my pocketbook);
• Pain from inconveniences (why do people with sail boats force the drawbridge to go up during rush hour?);
• Pain from relationships gone awry (finding the “right” or “better” person often involves going through the dating game of the damned);
• Pain from learning (like the pain of a children growing into a walking being, we sometimes suffer from the practice-makes-perfect process–and I still have a scar on my leg from learning how to flip a pancake on the stove and splashing hot oil on my previously scar free leg);
• Pain from accidents and activities (I was playing football and nearly beat that big lug nut on an end around–except that he pushed me out of bounds, right into that steel frame of the clothes lines);
• Pain from unmet goals (not every competitor takes the blue ribbon); and
• Pain from the destruction of false images (sometimes our lovers cannot be everything we hope they will be for us. Let’s face it, our lovers are merely human. Why do we think otherwise?)

I guess the second installment of my Seminar on Pain can be delivered when I figure out how to get my friend back to my office. Funny thing though, he does not come around or call as often as he used to. Perhaps I will have to go out there and find him.

Andrew Dósa, Esq.
1516 Oak Street, Suite 310
Alameda, California 94501
510/865-1600
(F) 510/865-7245

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Very touching!!

I love ya, Andrew.

Aside, my father was an “Orthodox Athiest,” and in truth, I’m merely agnostic… mind open, a scientist at heart, spirituality from within, more questions than answers.

Faith? One has it or doesn’t.

I believe, I’m in a “better place” because you’re my friend.

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