Jack Heald

I was taught in Bible class that faith was a gift from God. That means, “if you have faith, it is because God gave it to you, not because you did something to create it in yourself.” Ergo, people of faith have faith because it was given to them; nor is it given to everyone.

I don’t have the gift of faith. Many of the people I love do.

People who do not have the gift of faith can either pretend we do, which would make us liars but accepted by those with the gift, or else we can be honest about lacking that gift and be reviled by the believers for our lack of faith. It’s a lousy choice. Why do those with the gift look down on those without? Is not their faith a gift from God?

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One of my main complaints against Xianity is that it requires me to ignore the evidence of my senses. Paul in Romans says that nature clearly tells us about God, and I agree. My experience of nature confirms the existence of a Creator. Paul also  says that God’s nature is most clearly revealed to us in the man Jesus. That’s something I cannot experience directly. Instead, I must simply accept it and believe it. But without the gift of faith, how am I to believe it? I am forced to depend on what I can know using the only tools available to me: my mind, my intuition and my experience.

The guys who actually knew Jesus in the flesh – Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, Paul and the writer of Hebrews – wrote a good bit about him. How do I know that they wrote the truth?

I can’t.I have to trust that what is written in my New Testament is true. But the New Testament contains internal contradictions and makes claims that stretch credulity and defy experience. In other words, the New Testament gives every evidence of being the work of several men over a number of decades who might have engaged in some wishful fiction. Without the gift of faith, how can I overlook all these very real problems?

The problems go away if I treat the Bible as a magic book, delivered in toto and from the hand of God and flawlessly transcribed and transmitted by the hand of men. But to believe that, I have to ignore the evidence of my senses and my experience. I also have to accept without question an awful lot of flatly contradictory stuff in the Bible. The New Testament is more consistent than the Old, but it still has weird shit like James and Philemon and Paul’s apparent misogyny. (Oh, and the Revelation of St. John? Can anyone say “hallucinogenics”?)

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Most branches of Xianity teach that all people are important to God. Let’s examine that belief against the evidence: Hmmm, according to history, terrible things happen to good people all the time and evil people get away with unspeakable evil all the time. This has been true for all of recorded history. If I treated the people I love the way God treats the people whom He allegedly loves, my loved ones would have every reason to question the truth of my love.  I see no way around this problem. (And yes, I realize “the problem of evil” is not a new issue.)

The only way to believe that  ”all people are important to God” is to push rewards and punishment out to some place and time where we cannot observe them. In other words: “No matter how sucky life is now, everything will be made right after death.” So again, we are forced to just take it on faith that – regardless of what our experience teaches us – God cares for us. That’s pretty hard to do without the gift of faith.

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If I were a Seriously Bad Guy with designs on getting and keeping power, I would create a religion for my subjects that promised them eternal happiness as long as they tolerated an unlimited amount of earthly mistreatment. Unsurprisingly, that describes most religions and is how Xianity in fact functions.

And if I were some poor shmuck who knew my life was never gonna get any better, and that the people in power who oppressed me were always gonna be in power and always gonna get away with everything, I would comfort myself with the belief that “they’d get theirs in the end” and perhaps that I might be rewarded for my “faith”. Again, this is a pretty accurate description of how most religions – Xianity in particular – actually works.

Good deal for the powerful. Sucky deal for the oppressed.

Frankly, that’s a lot easier to believe.

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But what if not all people are important? That would explain God’s lack of care, but would also shoot a big hole in most Xian doctrine.

If only some individuals are important, then the odds are that I am one of the unimportant people. Intellectual honesty requires me to admit that.

Maybe there are only a few people in the world who are truly “important” and everyone else is just filler – bit players in the giant drama called “Life”  - completely interchangeable and completely dispensable.

If that is true, then what the unimportant people do is also unimportant.

It is a dilemma, for either everyone is important, in which case God’s clear lack of care belies the doctrine that He is all loving, or else only a few are important, which belies the doctrine that what we do matters to Him.

(There is a third way: hard-core Calvinism, in which God is a dick. I reject that just because I’m not interested in worshiping a God who is a dick.)

The only other option I can see is to believe in something which is impossible to observe or verify: we get rewarded or punished after death. Which leads us back to the gift of faith, which I don’t have.

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This post comes under the heading of “Not Exactly Scientific but Darned-Reliable Nonetheless”.

I was driving home the other day amidst the normal horrors of the southbound 101 at rush hour, and was irritated to see that traffic was stalled and slowed much farther along my route than normal. As I approached my exit, I saw the reason.

On the side of the road was a single traffic cop with his pretty blue and red flashing lights, and a single driver receiving a citation from said cop. As soon as traffic got past the cop by the side of the road, the traffic jam ceased and I was able to resume normal highway speeds.

Ordinarily, I would have forgotten this incident as it doesn’t seem particularly meaningful. We’ve all cursed the stupidity of people who seem to insist on slowing down to look at something on the side of the road, and this experience was no different. But the next day something happened that put the incident in a whole new light.

The next day I drove home the same time, same route, but traffic was moving at normal highway speeds the whole trip. At almost precisely the same point near my exit, I saw a car stalled on the side of the road. The only difference between this day’s trip and the previous day’s is that there was no cop with pretty flashing lights next to the stalled car.

And suddenly it hit me: cops cause traffic jams.

I’ve since noticed that this is almost ALWAYS the cause of traffic jams: whenever traffic on my commute is clogged up, the source of the bottleneck is almost always a cop on the side of the road writing a traffic tickets. I challenge you to start observing whether or not this is true in your community as well.

I hate traffic jams, especially unnecessary ones, and have been pondering the problem for years. I’ve always blamed the general stupidity of the populace for most traffic jams, but this observation has changed my opinion. Rather than condemn the populace for slowing down in the presence of flashing red and blue lights, why not just accept such behavior as a given in human behavior, and figure out a way to manage around it? And the way to manage around it is simple: prohibit the police from stopping anyone for traffic violations during rush hour.

I have proof-positive that if the cops would leave us alone to manage ourselves, we’d do just fine. (I know cops don’t believe this, but cops don’t believe anything.)

I propose that the cops stay off the road altogether during rush hour, and only show up in the event of a traffic accident. I’m sure some faint-hearted limp-wristed milqutoast will protest that the presence of traffic cops keep us safer, but my experience says otherwise. My experience says that the presence of cops – especially with their flashing lights – is the cause of the type of traffic snarl-ups which inevitably lead to multiple car rear-end collisions. I’d be willing to bet that those are the main sort of traffic accident that occurs during rush hour.

Want to have a faster, safer commute?

Get rid of the traffic cops.

Earth Day. Bleh.

I’m convinced Earth Day was conceived by tea-sipping western European elites who live in mild climates where nature is a devoted, loving and fertile servant to man. I know better. I spent my childhood in Oklahoma and half my adult life in Texas.

Oklahoma springtime meant tornadoes, thunderstorms, wicked unexpected heatwaves, late snowstorms and crop-crushing hail storms. Summer brought drought, searing heat, blowing dust and energy-sapping humidity. Fall was an explosion of allergens to make up for the relatively mild weather. Winter was tree-crushing ice storms. The ground was 90% limestone, so growing anything required dedication, hard work, sweat, perseverance and more than a bit of luck. We had poisonous snakes and venomous and/or biting bugs. In one 18 month stretch, my hometown of 35000 people suffered a devastating direct hit by a tornado and two “100 Year” floods. In other words, “Mother Nature” was mean, nasty, ill-tempered and downright murderous most all the time.

Texas was like Oklahoma only more so. Literally everything in nature was trying to kill you. The weather was tornadoes, hailstorms, thunderstorms, lightning storms, floods, droughts, high winds, searing heat, deadly cold, wicked temperature changes, (I clearly remember a day that had an early afternoon high in the 80s and a late afternoon reading in the 30s), and suffocating humidity. The ground was either caliche clay, which is impossible to till, or rocks. The array of venomous reptiles and bugs, dangerous animals and poisonous plants was exceeded only by the variety of airborne allergens. Literally everything about Mother Nature in Texas was hostile to human life. She was not man’s willing servant; she was a rabid, foam-mouthed, blood-toothed, sharp-clawed maniacal destroyer.

I lived in London for 15 months in 2001-2002. No bugs to speak of. No venomous critters. No poisonous plants. Mild weather year-round, (with a few exceptions). The ground is so fertile it is ridiculous. You could spit a watermelon seed out the back door and be harvesting watermelons 2 months later. Mother Nature, in SW England, was a compliant, willing and fecund servant to mankind. I understand most of France is the same way or better.

I came away from my sojourn in England convinced that the “Save the Earth” people had never lived in Texas or Oklahoma. I knew from experience that Mother Earth didn’t need to be cared for; she needed to be tamed, broken, collared and caged. She is a saber-toothed tiger, eager to shed man’s blood and blissfully indifferent to the consequences of her actions.

I’m nearly certain that the “Earth-First-ers” never spent weeks on end digging ton after ton of limestone from their vegetable garden. I’m pretty sure they never cowered in a “fraidy hole” hoping the tornado blowing over didn’t kill them. I’ll bet they never spent miserable weeks covered in Calomine lotion because they got a rash from poison oak, poison ivy or poison sumac all up and down their arms, legs, trunk and face. I’ll bet they never itched a night away because they were covered in chigger bites or fire ant bites from walking through the grass. I’ll bet they never had a pasture ruined and livestock killed by an invasion of fire ants. I’ll bet they never suffered through a drought that was broken by a flood, or an unrelenting rainy season broken by a drought. I’ll bet they never sat in the emergency room with a friend whose four-year-old son suffered a rattlesnake bite and prayed he wouldn’t lose his leg. I’ll bet they never dreaded fall and spring knowing that the effluvium from all the budding Texas junipers was going to make them sick for weeks. I’ll bet they never struggled season after season to get something – anything – besides weeds to grow in the dreadful soil. I’ll bet they never worried being bitten by a water moccassin while swimming in a local pond. I’ll bet they never chopped their beloved prize pecan trees into firewood because an ice storm had sheared off it’s 100-year-old limbs. I’ll bet they never tried to scrub the iron stains from their clothes – iron stains that came from the red dirt which wouldn’t grow anything useful.

From the time I started school until I was in college, Time Magazine ran cover story after cover story warning the world of an impending Global Ice Age. “The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst a building alarm about the dangers of a new ice age.” All the scientists agreed; it was coming and it was going to be bad. Then sometime in the 80′s “they” decided that Global Warming was the threat du jour. Recently, that has been changed yet again to “Global Climate Change”, (does that phrase have any meaning at all?) In my lifetime, the experts have wrongly predicted every sort of change possible to the environment. Forgive me for being skeptical now.

The “global warming/climate change” scientists have proven to be liars and frauds. Most so-called green technology actually consumes as much fossil fuel and/or creates as much pollution as the technology it is supposed to replace. Recycling waste is an expensive fools’ errand.

My experience is that nature is a rampaging killer, beating on the barricaded doors, jiggling the latches of the windows and probing every crack and crevice of the walls we have built to keep her out and keep us safe. The bulk of my life has been spent battling nature, not caring for it. The logical, natural extension of the philosophy espoused by the “Save the Earth” crowd is that man is a blight on nature and the best thing we could do for Mother Earth is to commit mass suicide.

Earth Day is a sad, sick, stupid joke played on the gullible, the forgetful and the guilt-ravaged. It helps nothing, it wastes time and it diverts our attention from real, solvable problems – like artificial turf and the designated hitter rule. (I contend that the world started going to hell with the advent of both.)