"The less religious you are, the more likely you are to think that aliens exist."  So said an recent op-ed piece by Clay Routledge in the New York Times.  Is he correct?  In his article, argues that even though we are more knowledgeable and intellectually confident than ever, we cannot escape our need for greater meaning, some sort of connection with whatever it is that we sense is beyond, figuratively, metaphorically, or physically, us.  
     He's not the only one in this regard.  Countless studies confirm that although interest on conventional religion has been decreasing steadily for decades, interest in spirituality has not waned; in fact, it has increased.  Hence, sometimes a highly irreligious person will want to believe in the something which, to her, speaks to her of things of the "spirit."  On occasion, these "things" can include aliens.  Why?  Aliens bespeak of a presence utterly foreign to this world, something we cannot find in this life, something that, well, is "alien" to us.
     In their interest in aliens, the irreligious among us confirm the fact of our need to answer the most fundamental questions of our existence.  To wit, it's hard, perhaps impossible, to evade who we most deeply are:  spiritual and believing beings.

     Most of us are aware of Charles Darwin, the British biologist who devised what has become known as the theory of natural selection and evolution.  Although Darwin was acutely aware of the potential flaws in his theory of species development, nowhere did he struggle more with this than in his conclusions about morality.  People did not designate actions as moral because they believed such actions would increase their happiness in the future, he suggested, but rather because they had concluded that these actions had increased happiness in the past.  Put another way, we humans decide what is moral on the basis of what has happened rather than on the basis of what will (or might) happen.
     Setting aside the troubling question of how to define the moral sense and why it has somehow risen, over a period of millions of years, out of formerly inert matter, we should note that defining morality in this way renders it highly subjective.  If it has worked in the past, the reasoning goes, it should continue to work in the future.  Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not.  On the one hand, this allows us to shape our morality according to the dictates of our particular moment; on the other hand, it leaves us without any solid basis for morality other than our happiness, itself a rather slippery term.
     Justice is not necessarily happy, nor is rectitude always fun.  Morality should be more than happiness, and it should be predicated on more than personal--or group--whimsy.  Better that we struggle to fit our convictions into "what is" than allow "what is" to shape our convictions.  Sure, we need to be ready to change with changing times, but not to let changing times make what has never been morally defensible, in turn, morally supreme.

     "Passion," says one of the characters in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, "we need passion."

     Precisely.  We cannot live without passion.  We also cannot live, the novel goes on to suggest, without unhappiness.  Brave New World paints a portrait of a society in which unhappiness is frowned upon, even banned.  As the story winds to a close, however, some of the inhabitants of this world come to conclude that happiness isn't enough.  We need to be, they say, unhappy. We need to see both sides of life.


     Quite true.  Oddly enough, however, we cannot do so unless we are living in a broken world.
     Ah, the dilemma of being human.

     "To be or not to be, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." 

     So wrote the Bard of Avon, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.  As we think about Shakespeare's birthday, which the world celebrated on April 23, we marvel at his ability to write such striking and memorable poetry and prose.  We are awestruck at his insight into the human condition, at his ability to create such stunning portraits of humans at the peaks of triumph or, alternatively, the depths of despair.  Shakespeare had a remarkable capacity for capturing life, for divulging the intimacies of what it means to be a human being.

     To be or not to be?  Do not we all ask ourselves this at some point?  Do not we all wonder why we are here?  What we should do?  Why will it end?
     Indeed.  We are only human, but ironically, that is all, Shakespeare constantly reminds us, we ought to be.
     And so, in this bewildering and astonishing world, is God.

     Yesterday was Earth Day.  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.
    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  They claim that the planet is ours to exploit, that the future is ours and no one else's, that the environmental degradation that allegedly plagues the planet is not nearly as severe as some assert, or that the world is far more adaptable than we suppose and that our "puny" machinations upon it do little long term damage.  Opposition to Earth Day is a curious mix of religion, economics, and politics.  It draws from all corners of the human spectrum.

     Underlying it all, however, is human arrogance.  People who dissent from Earth Day do so ultimately because whether they know it or not, they are assuming that they, and only they are the most important thing on the planet.  They assume that nothing is more important than the human's "right" and capacity to fulfill his or her own needs above, in absolute fashion, all else.  The human being is unquestionably number one, they say, and nothing that we do or do not do ought to deny this:  our desires reign supreme.
     Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image that when he noticed himself reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
     Regardless of where we stand religiously or politically, we really cannot dispute the essential truth of this story.  We are living in a world which we in no way made and in which we will in no way control fully.  We are only human.  If we think otherwise, the world will drown us, metaphorically for sure, in actuality perhaps, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
     As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all in it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

     What's gray?  It's not black, it's not white.  But it contains them both.  And that's the point.  Color is happy.  Color infuses us with a sense of existence, a sense of joy and meaning.  Moreover, there are things that can only be black and white, for instance, the existence of God.  Either God exists, or he does not.
     Is gray therefore unhappy?  Quite the opposite.  Gray is a statement of great insight.  Black and white doesn't always explain things fully.  It makes a statement without giving solid evidence that it is true.
     When we look at the world as gray, we come to understand that the most profound delineations permeating existence present puzzles that we cannot solve in black and white.  We can only look at them in gray.
     Gray reminds us that there is so much we do not know.  It tells us that, like it or not, we will live life in a mystery, a mystery in which we must learn to accept the inevitability of that which is unknown.
     If we really understand the fact of gray, we will understand the fact of God.

     How do we know where we are going, not only physically, but intellectually and spiritually as well?  The writer of Proverbs 16:9 offers an intriguing take on this dilemma.  "The mind of a human plans his way," he suggests, "but the Lord guides his steps."
     What does this mean?  Are we robots, pawns in the hands of God, creatures absent of free will?
     None of us would like to think so.  We make plans, we dream dreams, we conjure visions of what we want to do.  Then, if all seems good, we proceed.  Yet we do not do it in a vacuum.  If we did, we would only know what we see . . . and we all know that what we see is not all there is to "see."
     Robots we are not, beings we are.  Like the God who made us.

     Last week, at the monthly meeting of the atheist discussion group I attend, someone, a retired urologist, offered this observation.  What bothered him the most about Christians, he said, was that, "They insist that the Bible is the word of God."  As a result, he continued, "We see Christians making proclamations about what is good for everyone solely on the basis of what they read in the Bible.  It's an affront to me and a threat to my lifestyle."
     George has a good point.  Although it doesn't need to, religious certitude can indeed make people culturally intolerant.  Hence, as when our ancestors' rulers invoked a divine mandate to govern, making any criticism of them inherently wrong and sinful, so do religious believers today, by attaching divine sanction to their political views, render any dissent as words from the gates of hell.
     Unfortunately, political pluralism doesn't work this way.  When the right to speech and religion is universal, everyone in a society must make compromises, to a point, about the extent to which she believes her religious laws apply.  Atheist George must be as comfortable expressing, verbally as well as practically, his viewipoint as does a Christian, Muslim, or Jew.
     God didn't make each of us unique for no reason.  We therefore mar the Bible's picture of human dignity when we stifle, without legitimate reason, one another's freedom to be who circumstance, upbringing, and pyschology have made her to be.
     Believe in God, yes, but believe in the integrity of what he has made, too.

     No one enjoys paying taxes.  No one likes giving up their money to a government which they believe is not spending it wisely.  Ironically, however, few of us stop to appreciate that paying taxes is a privilege, a "perk" that attends working for a living.  If we do not work, sure, we do not pay taxes.  But wouldn't you rather be working?
     According to the New Testament (Romans 13) because governments are ordained by God and exist for our good, we pay our taxes.  But this raises other questions.  Does God ordain every government--even clearly evil ones?
     It's an extremely difficult position.  What is God really thinking?  I do not pretend to know.  But I will say that maybe the point is rather that, this dilemma notwithstanding, we pay taxes because we believe that regardless of how the world looks, God remains in it, working out his purposes for it.  It's a good world with good people.  It is a world created by and infused with God.  It's also a world in which, as a result, we are present.
    Therefore, in the biggest possible picture, everything, though we do not always see or know it, has a point.  Even taxes.

     At least in the Western Hemisphere, today is Friday the 13th.  If you are of a superstitious bent, you may sense an omen.  Or a portent.  Isn't it curious that, even in this so-called scientific age, the age of rationality and reason, many of us persist in entertaining these types of mythologies?  While we may have rejected notions of the supernatural or have perhaps redefined them to our liking, we still cling to our myths.
     Why?  Many reasons, but it seems that the major one is this:  we cannot do without invoking some measure of "beyondness" to understand who and where we are.  We cannot live without acknowledging that, despite everything we know, we sense the need for something more, something with which to understand what it all means.  It could be superstition, it could be omen, it could be mythology, it could even be (gasp!), God.

     As a French writer pointed out a number of years ago, we cannot live without this "incredible" need to believe.

     Last week, America remembered the fiftieth anniversary of the assassiination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I will never forget the moment, the moment on that day in long ago 1968, on which I got the news.  I was shocked, terribly shocked:  why?  Why did people hate King so much?  Why did people want to see him dead?
     Worse, I fear I could find, even today, people who continue to be happy that King died on that day in 1968.  On the other hand, I am thankful for the progress America has made in reducing racial discrimination and injustice.  So much has happened, so much good, so much gain.  Unfortunately, however, we still have a long way to go.


     Like Mahatma Gandhi, whose work he studied (along with the Bible), King was convinced that addressing and eliminating injustice must be a spiritual activity.  God, he believed, is the author of freedom, and God, he asserted, must be the progenitor of anything we do to achieve it.  Hence, we are commanded, he concluded, to at all times use nonviolence to realize our objectives.
    And it worked.  We rightly admire King today, admire him for many things.  What we might admire most is his desire and ability to frame his work in the aegis of love, love of the world, love of humanity, love of God.
     For as Paul reminds us in the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthian church, in the end, only love, the love of God for you, the love of God for me, will endure.

     Kolyma?  I recently had opportunity to reread Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  I first read it over forty years ago, and have never forgotten it.  Denisovich describes one day in the life of a prisoner in one of Russian dictator Josef Stalin's gulag camps, the prison camps he ordered built around the country to house people with whom he was displeased.  (And Stalin was a person who liked very few others.)
     Denisovich is a harrowing tale of survival.  Rising and working in minus twenty-eight degree weather, its protagonist writes movingly of the little things he does to survive, the way he procures extra bread, his ingenuity in securing a place near a fire, his discovery of a piece of metal which he can use for other things.  We marvel at his energy and optimism, always wondering whether we'd be able to do likewise.
     And we think also of the paranoia of Stalin, a man who, most historians believe, is responsible for over fifty million deaths.  We cannot grasp the scale of the terror he waged upon the Russian people.

     As I reread Denisovich, I also read, for the first time, Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov.  Like Solzhenitsyn, Shalmov wrote from direct experience.  It is set in the region of Kolyma River, deep in far northeastern Siberia, thousands and thousands of miles away from anything, much farther from Moscow than was Solzhenitsyn (and this is in no way intended to minimize Solzhenitsyn's situation:  both men deserve our deep respect for surviving and writing about it).  It is a place where, as Shalamov describes it, people who see a person dying do what they can to hasten it, a place where temperatures plunge to fifty degrees below zero and, despite an "official edict" stating that no one shall work in temperatures lower than minus forty, people are still forced to work.  It is a place to come and die, a place utterly without hope, a place that underscores the darkness of the human heart.
     The other day I wrote about the glory of humanity.  Today I write about its tragedy.  What kind of being is the human being, this unworldy blend of darkness and light, an entity capable of such artistic power yet equally adept at destroying life?
     It's enough to make one want to believe in sin.

     On my bookshelf (actually, on my coffee table) is a book called The Twentieth Century.  In photos and prose, this book chronicles every year of the last century, retelling every significant event, person, and trend that shaped it.  It's an impressive piece of research and assemblage of information.
     As I sit on this April day in 2018, however, I realize that the twentieth century is now nearly twenty years behind us.  Although its centers, things such as World War II and the Cold War, have been objects of academic study for many years, its ending, the Nineties, have not.  We are only now beginning to assess them.
     And what have we found?  It's probably too soon to say, but we can offer this much:  in the big picture, not much has changed.  Technology continues to its burgeoning ways; wars continue to break out; famine continues to trouble various parts of the planet; art and music continue to evolve, and so forth.  What leaves us breathless, however, is realizing that even though the current century seems more of the same, it is also an immensely creative reimaging of who we are as human beings.  Our imagination knows no end.
     Nor does the imagination of the one in whose image we are made.  For good reason did Renassiance writer Pico della Mirandola pen his "Dignity of Man":  humanity is a well whose depth we will never fully draw.
     And given our origins, this is exactly as it should be.  Rejoice.  Rejoice in the forces, cosmic and divine, that have "conspired" to produce the human being.

     Did you happen to catch the televised version of "Jesus Christ, Superstar" last week?  I managed to see a little of it before I had to move on.  I've not seen the original stage version, though I well remember its immense popularity when it came out in the Seventies.  Even if one has quarrels with its theology (for instance, it does not portray the resurrection), one cannot deny the beauty and flow of its music.  Lead composer Andrew Lloyd Webber produced a masterpiece.
     As I was telling an irreligious friend recently, however, I'm not overly offended by the musical's absence of an account of Jesus' resurrection.  What I find most compelling about it is its ability to present to us a Jesus who is a person like us.  Like all of us, this Jesus gets weary.  Like all of us, this Jesus gets frustrated and angry.  And like all of us, this Jesus wrestles with the demands of his calling.  It is a Jesus as human as you or me
     And this is as it should be.  If God had not become like us, if the divine had not become human, we would have had no real way to understand our creator.  He would forever be the proverbial "man upstairs," there, but actually not:  a Kantian figurehead and nothing more.  We'd still be lost in the various abyssess of our human finitude and fragility, magnificent, yes, but thoroughly unable to make full sense of this existence.
     Hence, wherever your religious sensibilities lie, Andrew Lloyd Webber, thanks for giving this intimately genuine picture of the son of God.

     Amidst the journey leading to Easter and my recent travels, I failed to take note of the passing of one of the world's great scientists, Stephen Hawking.  Perhaps one of the most well known scientists on the planet, Stephen Hawking did some extraordinary and ground breaking work on the nature of the universe.  And he did most of it while dealing with the dehabilitations of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.  In a life that lasted far longer than anyone could have predicted, Hawking made immense contributions to our understanding of reality.
     Many people are uncertain as to where Hawking stood spiritually.  Many are uncomfortable with how he seemed to push God well away from any role in cosmic origins.  Regardless, we can thank Hawking for demonstrating to us that whether we believe in God or not, we live in a thoroughly amazing cosmos.  Its fullness is overwhelming.
     Furthermore, the universe is ultimately about harmony, structure, and order.  It is intelligible, it is understandable.
     And it would not exist without intelligence, not ours of course, but God's.
     Rest well, Professor Hawking.

As I was traveling last week, I didn't get opportunity to take note of April 1 which is, in addition to being, in many parts of the world, April Fools Day, the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work expresses a blending of intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, aptly capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination, the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness.  It takes us to the peaks of ecstasy, and drags us through the darkest nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be as real as anything can possibly be.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we ultimately make our biggest decisions with our heart.  As Paul says in Romans 10, we believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, but we trust it with our heart.
     Long live the Romantics.