The God Question
I was born, baptized, and educated into the Catholic Faith. In first grade, in 1955, this was the first question and answer from the Baltimore Catechism that the sister handed out for us to use every day.
Who made me?
God made me.
So anything Catholic that happens in the world reminds me of my childhood Faith.
Coincidentally, I’ve been listening to Bob’s 1979 album, Slow Train Coming, with one of my favorite Dylan songs, Precious Angel, with this chorus.
Shine your light, shine your light on me
Shine your light, shine your light on me
Shine your light, shine your light on me
Ya know I just couldn’t make it by myself
I’m a little too blind to see
Oh man, if one of the greatest cultural individualists of all time, also the author of Like a Rolling Stone, and
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Two songs, fifteen years apart, with a similar theology. If even Dylan, the orneriest, don’t tell me what to do genius, needs help, as he pleads early in Angel,
To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone
How weak was the foundation I was standing upon
Then what about an average schmuck like me who thinks he escaped from his Faith half a century ago?
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It turns out it isn’t easy to be an atheist or an agnostic, which is not believing in either the existence or nonexistence of a deity.
A couple of weeks ago, through a Lifelong Learning course and the book Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief, I learned that the human brain includes cultural tools that make believing in gods easy or natural. One such tool, which the proponents of the Cognitive Science of Religion call agency detection, is a built-in bias to look for agents behind events, present from the earliest beginnings of homo sapiens.
This is the proverbial need for Mr Caveman to take the thinnest possible evidence of a predator seriously because the cost of not doing so was too great. Last night, for example, I heard a door creak and immediately was on alert.
There are other tools like that, but I think you get the point. Every human society includes gods of some sort because our brains are biased toward this phenomenon. Our instructor makes clear that this cultural prejudice does not mean there is a God gene or that religious belief is inevitable or is proof of God.
This idea, our noggin’s natural fealty toward the transcendent, is new to me. And I’m processing it. Something, I hope, my own brain is still able to do at 77. But it does help me understand why I’ve never been able to let go of the feeling that, in the theologian Marcus Borg’s words found in The Heart of Christianity, there is a MORE out there,
A nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality.
My sometimes Muse Bob seems to know, as reflected in his long lifetime of songs.
Me? Though I now understand why I’m still in the God game, the answers from my first religious instruction don’t suit me as an adult. Because my brain apparently has a default position, it’s incumbent upon me to keep searching, which perhaps doesn't come so naturally. Still, one is more than his brain, isn’t she?
As I walk tentatively toward what might or might not be the abyss, I wonder what I might find, or if there will be any longer an I to discover what is or isn’t there.
If not, that would be a bummer, so my brain says.
Thanks very much to Mary Acton for the prompt about changing one’s mind. More November prompts are available here.
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