For the Bible Tells Me So

One of my favourite quotes was made by the late Erma Bombeck, "Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving." With a Catholic mom and a Baptist father and as a young adult becoming a Salvationist, I know guilt - and yes, it is the gift that keeps on giving.

In my early 30s when it became clear to me that I could not adhere to the heterosexual imperative our society demands, I stepped away from the church. Why hang around someplace where you know that they would run you out just for being who you are?

In the ensuing years I have had to find my own sense of spirituality but have often thought of all the young people, still within their churches, questioning their sexuality. I've read that suicide rates for young people who question their sexuality are much higher than the average and I often wonder if this is not because of the guilt and shame which is inflicted by fundamental and main-stream religions.

This past week while perusing the titles at the video store I came across this title:
For the Bible Tells Me So.

If you are a young person reading this who is struggling with your sexuality or a parent whose child has just revealed her/his sexuality, or anyone who has struggled with reconciling your faith with your sexuality, run to your video store and rent this film.

Religious school funding

I admit, I attended Catholic schools right up until high school. When we lived in New York, my mom paid tuition but when we moved to Ontario mom had the choice of sending us to the public school or the Catholic school as both were funded by tax dollars.

This funding of Catholic schools and creation of a separate school system dates back to the 1800s yet Ontario is the only province in Canada which still funds Catholic schools. In November 1999, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found Canada in violation of the equality provisions of that Covenant by virtue of Ontario's discriminatory school system. So in this upcoming election the Tories say they will fund "faith-based" schools.

See, I've got a problem with that. I don't believe the education I got was any better than my playmates who attended public school. Apart from the catechism classes, we all learned our alphabet, how to count to 10, tie our shoes and break the graham crackers on the line. I don't believe we need more than one publicly funded school system.

Of course I think that parents should be able to choose what type of education their children will receive so if they want their kids to get "religious instruction" with their ABC's, then send them to a private school - not one publicly funded. I'm for giving parents who wish to send their kids to a "faith-based" school some sort of tax credit to help off-set the additional cost.

What's sort of hypocritical about the Catholic schools these days is that you don't necessarily have to be Catholic to attend one. If the numbers of Catholic children enrolled in these separate schools declines to a point where keeping the school open is in question, they will allow non-Catholics to attend in order to boost their enrollment numbers up to the level to qualify for government funding. I have friends who teach in the separate school system and tell me that in some schools the non-Catholics outnumber the Catholics. So tell me, what's the point in having and paying for two different school boards? In my mind religion has no place within a publicly funded education system.

The Things THEY Know

I am a child of the space race; the progeny of unprecedented technological and scientific discovery. Mine was the generation who gazed at the nightime sky in hopes of spotting orbiting space capsules; who looked to science to explain life's mysteries.

I remember watching the opening of the original War of The Worlds movie, your remember, where Sir Cedric Hardwicke describes the other planets and why the Martians chose to invade Earth. Of Pluto he says the Martians couldn't go there because the atmosphere was frozen. They couldn't go to Uranus or Neptune because their atmosphere was full of methane gas and ammonia vapours. Saturn was a no-go because it was too cold and Jupiter had to be ruled out because it was too hot. Venus had no water or air and Mercury's temperature was as hot as a volcano.

Back then you just accepted these statements because you knew THEY knew these things to be true. Who were THEY? Well scientists of course. Everyone knew that somewhere in the bowels of some university lurked a “think tank”, a “panel of experts”, a swarm of scientists, a passel of pocket protected professors or at least a bespeckled guy with a slide rule who could be counted on to explain things in “laymen's terms”.

Still though, I wondered how they knew the temperature of Jupiter or that there was methane gas on Neptune. If you've never been there, how do you know?

I was watching a program called The Ghost Particle on Nova the other night and they were talking about neutrinos. I know, it sounds like a fancy Italian pastry but neutrinos are invisible sub-atomic particles. Unlike other particles you may have heard of, they carry no electric charge so they cannot be detected by traditional means.

The program showed how this guy, John Bahcall, sat down and mathematically worked out how the sun works. Think about it. He sits down and figures out an equation that explains the fusion reactions inside the sun. How do you do that?

A big source of these neutrinos is the sun so this other guy, Ray Davis, goes down into an old gold mine somewhere in South Dakota and builds this experiement to try and trap these invisible particles. Where do you even start? I would think it's easier to trap farts in a bubble wouldn't you?

A couple of years ago I saw another Nova program called The Elegant Universe. I watched this show because they mentioned Einstein in the advertisements. When I was twelve I had three heroes, Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie and Albert Einstein. I thought the program was about Einstein, so I watched. What it actually was about was a physics theory called string theory.

Now string theory goes way beyond the neutrino. Basically, string theory says that at the highest microscopic level, everything is made up of groups of vibrating strings and this explains the nature of all matter. If this theory holds water, it is quite possible that matter or energy can exist on up to ten spatial dimensions. We live in a three-dimentional spatial world but what if there were seven additional dimesions existing right alongside of us? Is that mind blowing or what?

If that doesn't blow your mind think about this:

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Within each of us is a series of electro-chemical reactions, a life force, if you will, which powers the body. Perhaps this force can one day be measured much like the mathematical efforting of the fusion reactions which power the sun. Anyhow, if this energy cannot be created or destroyed, where does it go when we die? Could it be that this energy simply moves from one spatial dimension to another? What if heaven was simply another spatial dimension a breath away from our own? Think about this and the impact these theories may have on what many hold as their religious or spiritual beliefs.

I've always thought that scientic theories and religious or spiritual concepts went together as well as oil and vinegar. Perhaps we are entering a time in history where science can begin to explain the spiritual answers we have had since we first crawled out of African caves, and were hunting-gathering for a good salad.

I'm not a scientist. The only theory I know and can swear by is the one stating that the severity of an itch is directly proportional to its reach. But I do like to think about these things and wonder how it all fits together. I'm curious about the things THEY know. Aren't you?

Penn's comments

I posted Penn Jillette's comments here because they resonated with me.

As a child of a Roman Catholic mother and Southern Baptist father who grew up to become a Salvationist, my relationship with "the lord" was no casual summer fling. I really wanted to believe.

In cathechism class I was always the kid with my hand up - I always had questions. I really wanted to believe. I wanted to understand. I was not satisfied with the priest's response that I simply had to have faith. When he tried to explain the nature of transubstatiation I wanted to know why, at that crucial moment of the mass, the bread and wine still looked like bread and wine and not flesh and blood. Was it a magic trick that went wrong?

I wanted to know what was the difference between the "heathen cannibals" of the jungle and us - holy Catholics who ate the flesh and drank the blood of christ. I wanted to know what "limbo" was as I thought it was a dance I saw some people doing last week on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Seems I always spent the last half of cathechism class on my knees in the hallway reciting the Act of Contrition. Looking back, I think that by the time I was eight, I was very close to excommunication.

As a child I really wanted to believe because I wanted to understand god and understand why the world was the way it was. When I was grown, I wanted to believe because it was easier to believe, or at least say you believe, than it was to voice my doubts. Kind of like it was easier to play straight than it was to come out.

Coming from a very religious family, blurting out at the dinner table that you don't believe in god is like, well, farting in church. Ok, way worse than farting in church. I suppose the next worse thing you could do is announce that you are gay. That's a go-straight-to-hell-do-not-pass-Go in one single roll of the dice.

I'm always struck by some people's notion that you need religion to form one's morals (moral fibre they call it - better than a dose of oatbran). In this day of the rise of the religious right (wrong), it is nearly dangerous to proclaim one's disbelief for those who do so are villified.

This reminds me of some of the religious tracts my Pentecostal friends would peddle. In these tracts they described how in the end times Christians would be persecuted. You would have to choose between being branded with the "mark of the beast" (back then some speculated that the mark would be the newly invented UPS symbols), or public beheading.

Seems to me today that it is the so-called "christian" right who is weilding the headman's axe. I call them "so-called christians" because I believe that even if they claim to have read the bible "inside and out", they are in desperate need of remedial reading comprehension.

There is no god

Heard on NPR, Nov.21 05

There is No God
by Penn Jillette

"I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more."

I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond Atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The Atheism part is easy.

But, this "This I Believe" thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, "This I believe: I believe there is no God."

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I'm not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it's everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I'm raising now is enough that I don't need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories.That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don't travel in circles where people say, "I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith." That's just a long-winded religious way to say, "shut up," or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, "How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do." So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that's always fun. It means I'm learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

------------------
Anthony LowePenn Jillette is the taller, louder half of the magic and comedy act Penn and Teller. He is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and has lectured at Oxford and MIT. Penn has co-authored three best-selling books and is executive producer of the documentary film The Aristocrats.