Rational Faith

Spirituality Column #101
October 14, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) Newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) Newspaper

Rational Faith
By Bob Walters

Bill Maher used to be a funny guy. I saw him 20 years ago when he was the hired entertainment at an auto racing banquet in Monterey, Calif. He did a nice job.

He turned up a couple years later on the ABC TV show “Politically Incorrect” and through the 1990s morphed from comic into a savvy political/cultural satirist/wise guy. Generally funny and irreverent, his nightly mix of four oddly-matched guests in group conversation about current issues seemed compelling, relevant and often surprising.

I remember one night his guests were hard-right G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate break-in fame, a verbose and passionate conservative African-American woman activist whose name I cannot remember, pleasant “Brady Bunch mom” actress Florence Henderson, and Satan-worshipping bilge rock musician Marilyn Manson, who by the way is a guy.

Surprisingly, the only guest who consistently made sense was Manson, speaking quietly of his desire, as an artist, to push the limits of what people believed. He didn’t bash Christ or defend Satan. His stage act is truly horrifying (I’ve seen clips and heard stories), but that evening he simply sounded like a thoughtful artist.

Maher moved on to no-holds-barred HBO and renamed his show “Real Time.” I lost track of him because I don’t have HBO. But he’s turned up now in the movies with his intensely anti-God screed of a film, "Religulous." It is a Christian-bashing, God-denying, religion-ridiculing atheist’s delight promoting the irrationality of faith.

Certainly some faith groups will organize boycotts, but it is so over-the-top I doubt many people take the film seriously.

Before its release, I spent quite a bit of time studying the film’s website which has several clips and plenty of explanatory background. I got the gist of the film and probably won’t bother paying to see it.

More than anything, I watch Maher and feel an intense human pang of regret, in a seriously prayerful way, that anyone is so distant from and intellectually hostile toward God and the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Maher seems like a scared kid trying to talk his way out of the principal’s office.

I’m happy, joyful and secure in my faith and see Christ as the most consistently rational, intellectually stimulating part of my being.

Rationality dictates that God’s existence depends neither on my saying He does, nor Maher saying He doesn’t. God just is. Faith is that simple.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that so many people try to create God in their own image, and get so mad when God doesn’t cooperate.

What We Choose to Believe

Spirituality Column #100
October 7, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Curren! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

What We Choose to Believe
By Bob Walters

Acclaimed postmodern writer David Foster Wallace, the recently deceased author of Infinite Jest, once said, “The only thing that is capital T True is that you get to decide … what you worship.”

This particular truth coming from a postmodernist – someone who shuns the ideas of absolute truth or of a God who is the final arbiter of right and wrong – is astonishing.

It was part of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

In adult life, Wallace said, “there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Wallace lists money, things, our own body, beauty, intellect and sexual allure – our self-centered default settings – among that which we will unconsciously learn to worship in the absence of a conscious spiritual focus.

Wallace eloquently describes how our automatic, hard-wired human self-centeredness traps us and spiritually kills us, i.e., eats us alive: we will fear the loss of money, the loss of beauty, power and allure, the inadequacy of not knowing everything.

Wallace is saying that my conscious faith in Christ or your conscious faith in something else pulls our human passions away from, and hence gives us freedom from, our self-centeredness – our utter focus on self, and on self as God – that was Satan’s leverage in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

Wallace went on to say, “the really important kind of freedom involves … [our individual] … discipline … to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Unwitting as it may have been, that is an excellent description – a capital T Truth – of what Christians are supposed to be.

Wallace suffered from long-term depression and committed suicide Sept. 12 (2008). I doubt he would have read so much Christian theology into his address, given that he couldn’t bring himself to spell out “Jesus Christ” (J.C.). But Jesus was unmistakably in that piece of writing.

We choose what we believe. True. Choose wisely.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) found this address in the Sept. 19, 2008, Wall Street Journal. It makes Bill Mahar’s new “Religulous” movie about the irrationality of faith seem awfully small.