On Giving Thanks Where Thanks Is Due

Right off I want to wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Of late I have begun to post more on my religious views. Actually, I prefer "spiritual" over "religious." As I indicated in Monday's post, my view of God leans more towards a pantheistic, maybe panentheistic, concept than anything else.

Prayer is a subject I haven't tackled much yet, though I intend to do that in the near future. But I will go this far now ... to ask if someone like myself, who doesn't find the concept of a personal deity satisfying, feels that prayer is purposeful.

In a word, no ... if petitionary prayer is meant.

However, I regard prayer as a useful spiritual exercise for the person doing the praying. In prayer and meditation we are putting our feelings into words and thoughts. And that practice is quite helpful to us, I believe, because it helps us to understand ourselves a little better.

I "pray" quite regularly in the sense that I verbalize my deepest feelings about the world around me. So maybe I'm just talking to myself when I do this. If so, so be it. Sometimes my joy at the beauty of the universe and the blessings nature has bestowed on me is just too much for me to contain - so I just let it out in praise and thanks. At these times I am the most at peace and at home in the cosmos. (I like the word cosmos: it defines the universe as an orderly, harmonious system.)

This leads me right into the subject at hand: Thanksgiving prayer.

To whom should we direct our prayers of thanks? A patriarchal Sky God who, as Albert Camus once put it, "sits in silence?"

Okay, if that is your choice it is fine by me and I certainly respect your right to that viewpoint and hope you respect my right to mine as well. For that matter I wish we all could respect everyone's right to think as they wish about the subject.

But for my part, I believe Mother Nature has given us solid proof of her nurturing spirit. This is something for which we should all be thankful. Mother Nature seems more real to me than a hidden deity in some Beautiful Isle Of Somewhere.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in Homer's Hymn To The Earth: Mother Of All:

O universal Mother, who dost keep
From everlasting thy foundations deep,
Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee!
All shapes that have their dwelling in the sea,
All things that fly, or on the ground divine
Live, move, and there are nourished--these are thine;
These from thy wealth thou dost sustain; from thee
Fair babes are born, and fruits on every tree
Hang ripe and large, revered Divinity!

Turkey Day Is Almost Here

I know only one poem by heart. The stupid thing about it is that I learned this poem when I was in the fourth grade, age 10.

Out of the scores of poems and other things I had to commit to memory during my school years, this poem alone has stayed in my memory to this day. I'll never know why.

I have been unable to determine who authored it. But with Thanksgiving Day coming, I thought I would share it with you now:

The Pilgrims Came

The Pilgrims came across the sea,
And never thought of you and me;
And yet it's very strange the way
We think of them Thanksgiving day.

We tell their story, old and true
Of how they sailed across the blue,
And found a new land to be free
And built their homes quite near the sea.

Every child knows well the tale
Of how they bravely turned the sail
And journeyed many a day and night,
To worship God as they thought right.


And so the radical religious nuts came ashore and are with us still to this day.

And, honestly, I never think of the pilgrims on Turkey Day unless someone else brings it up.

Incidentally, according to the accounts I have read, God "blessed" over half the pilgrims by taking them home that first winter via starvation and disease!

By the way, I will be here tomorrow with another post and hope you will visit me here. I want to try to try explain a little bit of what Thanksgiving means to me.

And now a sad personal note. I lost another friend yesterday. My best friend's little weenie dog, Sassy.

God, how I loved that little dog! That isn't a picture of her (I don't have one), but it is the same kind of dachshund (there are several varieties).

Ours was a friendship from our first meeting, just short of two years ago. She barked at me, waddled over to me (she was quite overweight) and let me pet her. I loved her at first sight. Many is the evening she spent in my lap as we all watched tv.

My friend and I and Sassy went for quite a few walks last summer. And Sassy loved riding in the car. Once we all went to the Sonic Drive-In and had dinner. She was my best friend's constant companion.

Sassy was 15 years old, and we knew the end was very near for her. Her health declined all during this past year, with frequent bouts of sickness. Her arthritis got worse and made going up and down the stairs a real hardship. Finally she developed a severe kidney infection with a high fever and chills, and my best friend had to have my little friend, her close companion, put to sleep. I wasn't there to say good bye, having already gone to bed for the night.

When I found out the next morning, I was devastated. I hummed Old Shep all day long at work and reminisced about Sassy. If only dogs did have a heaven....

Then the thought occurred to me that I did indeed say goodbye to her - in a fashion.

A couple of weeks ago, during one of her sick times, I was visiting my best friend (who lives across the street from me) and suggested we take Sassy for a ride in my truck in order to make her feel better. So away we went. Sassy got into my lap and I held her in my arm as she leaned out my window. Usually she rode with her "mama," but this time she rode with me as I drove.

We rode through the neighborhood and after about twenty minutes I brought them back. The first thing Sassy always did after a car ride was take a leak. So I got out of the truck and sat her down to use the bathroom. Instead she ran to my deck to chase my cats - the most activity she had had for a while.

The was the last time I spent time with her. And it was quality time.

Funny how close I can get to little animals when I tend to be distant with most people. I will miss Sassy tremendously.

Most People Don't Understand The Bible

If you don't believe the Bible, why don't you go out and kill someone or rob a bank ... why don't you just do whatever you want?

Those were the words of my frustrated mother after I had told her that I didn't accept as true something (now I can no longer remember what it was) that she was alluding to in the Bible.

I didn't answer other than to shake my head. It was just too ridiculous a question. She obviously hadn't thought about it before she blurted it out.

When Christians ask if me if I "believe the Bible," it's really hard to give a brief answer.

What I don't believe is that God wrote the Bible through men. I can't believe it is, as the fundamentalists put it, inerrant. Anyone who has ever studied the Bible in depth must realize what an insult those claims would be to any self-respecting God.

If the average Bible believer knew the whole story of how the Bible was assembled, not only would they be shocked, but honesty would compel them to be skeptical of claims for it of infallibility.

But what I do believe about the Bible is that it records the history of a people in the Old Testament, and in the New the history of a movement - histories that are replete with legends.

There are both good and bad to be found in the Bible. God is often portrayed as somewhat bipolar and at times quite unfair. The case for a God who predestines the fate of man is unmistakably clear, pretty much as Augustine and Calvin presented the matter. The Hebrew wisdom literature is helpful, Ecclesiastes above everything else in the entire Bible.

The Christian who asks the question "What would Jesus do? is obviously unfamiliar with fact that he was an apocalyptic prophet who expected an imminent overturning of the then world order and its replacement with God's kingdom on earth, literally.

The past two thousand years, what has commonly been called the Church Age by Christians, was totally unexpected and unforeseen by Jesus. Therefore his teachings are not practical for the long haul. It follows that no Christian or group of Christians today consistently practice what Jesus taught.

The Bible is a fascinating book. One that I have spent my lifetime reading and studying. It is fair to say that no one who fails to understand the popular interpretation of the Bible can fully understand our nation's history or the mind set of those people today who have married politics to Christianity.

But the popular interpretation is far from what one will find by taking off the blinders of presupposition and reading it in its historical context.

My contention is that the Bible is the most misunderstood of all books, and will remain so as long as critical study of it is discouraged by the forces who seek to use religion to control people and to enrich themselves financially.

To use one of Jesus' phrases, we mostly see "the blind leading the blind" in the matter.

The Real God Of My Youth

My earliest memory of thinking about God - and here I mean really thinking about the subject rather than just rehashing what I had heard in church - occurred when I was about eight or nine years of age.

I remember that day when climbing into my mother's car that I suddenly announced to her and my brothers that I believed the wind blew the dust around in the heavens, eventually forming God.

It wasn't that profound, and I remember clearly where my ideas originated. This business of God having existed "from everlasting to everlasting" never made sense to me. Supposedly before creation there was nothing but God. Well do I remember as a child trying hard to imagine nothingness. I just couldn't do it.

But the dirt of the good old terra firma beneath my feet seemed real enough and maybe eternal enough. Nature seemed real enough to me, and, evidently seemed creative enough as well.

This part is a little embarrassing, however. The image in my mind of my "creation of God" scenario was based on the opening segment of the Rankin/Bass animated feature Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. Remember how the wind blew the snow into the opening credits?

My mother dismissed my theory as childishness and then explained again to me how that God had always existed.

Well, this is one child that never asked his parent, "Who created God?"

Somehow, even as child, it seemed more sensible to me that the universe was more likely to be the brute fact rather than God.

And, read rightly, I believe the Hebrew mythology contained in the first chapters of Genesis points not to an ex nihilo creation, but rather a fashioning out of existing material.

What I do know is that as I got older, as I learned more about the universe and more about ancient mythology, as I slowly cast off the fundamentalist religion of my youth, God became less of person in my thinking and more of a power or force.

I came to believe the old saw that man made God in his own image rather than vice versa. Or rather that men have made their Gods in their various images: warring Gods, anal retentive Gods, misogynistic Gods, emotionally distant Gods, insecure and jealous Gods, etc.

It just makes much more sense to me.

A Freethinker In The Bible Belt

There is a freethought association near where I live - but I'm not a joiner, so big deal. While fellowship with fellow freethinkers is occasionally (very occasionally here where I live) enjoyable, it isn't something I need in order to keep from relapsing into religious fundamentalism.

The roots of fundamentalist Christianity run deep here. It is quite common for local television and radio personalities to speak openly and loudly about their religion. One anchorman, after a story about the testing of what effect prayer might have on illness, made the comment, "I don't know about all that, but it sure does make me feel better to pray." Okay; I'm happy for him.

Bumper stickers proudly proclaim that "God Is My Co-Pilot," "In Case of Rapture This Car Will Be Unmanned," "Jesus Is Lord," and various other gems of wisdom everywhere you look (along with slogans glorifying gun ownership, attacking welfare, and supporting the overthrow of Roe V Wade).

My dentist and his personnel apparently are all Christians. I have had the misfortune of being treated to a mini theology lesson while having my teeth cleaned. I have a hard and fast rule against debating religion with anyone who has dental instruments in my mouth, but hopefully silence is golden.

My doctor, too, is a Christian. At my last prostate exam I made the mistake of saying - with, I thought, more than sufficient sarcasm - "Oh, boy, my favorite part of my physical." He obviously didn't find the intended humor and said, almost with a sense of urgency, "I hope you aren't serious!"

"No, I'm not serious; now let's get it over with!"

The letters to editor section of the local newspapers are forums for fundamentalists and Christian Supremacists to spread their vile idiocy and anti-science stances. I used to make efforts to offer an alternative viewpoint, but I don't have that much time to write that many letters, even if the editorial policies permitted me to submit frequent rebuttals (which they don't).

My place of employment has a distinctively Christian flavor about it. I know of but one atheist and one doubter, and of course there is yours truly, who are not Christians. We had our annual company Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday. We always have a prayer before eating, always offered by a Christian fundamentalist.

This time it was offered by liberalism's biggest critic at our plant, a man who once admitted to me when I questioned him about his frequent use of salty language (when not saying grace, of course), that he was mostly a backslidden Methodist.

The number of people I work with who have told me they believe in God, Jesus, the Bible, and yet admit when I ask them that they don't belong to or attend any church is staggering.

You see, down here even the sinners pay lip service to religion. It is a tradition.

There is a reason for that. Unbelief is considered by most around these parts to be the equivalent of rank evil. Few seem to be able to grasp the concept of personal morality apart from belief in the Bible. Oh, and the theory of evolution is the same thing as philosophical atheism, which is itself considered a religion here! (Yes, I actually had that argument with a co-worker a couple of years ago.)

While I try to do what little I can to promote freethinking, I would be darned happy and quite satisfied too if I could just get Christians to be more tolerant. But it isn't likely to happen very often because, sadly, to the fundamentalist, tolerance is akin to compromise and apostasy