If God is calling everyone into a relationship with him, why do some people not hear the call?

Maybe it’s because religion is wired into some people’s brains and not others. If this is true, it would suggest that religiosity is a organically based phenomenon rather than a spiritual calling. I will delete the many references from the following quotations from a recent study entitled “Religiosity in patients with Parkinson’s disease.”*

“Relative to other major life goals parkinsonian patients were significantly more likely to report that ‘my religion or life philosophy’ was less important than were age-matched controls. Scores on a battery of religiosity scales were consistently lower for Parkinson’s patients than those of age-matched controls.”

And

“Several recent carefully controlled neuroimaging and neuropsychological investigations of potential brain correlates of religiosity consistently implicate neo-striatal, limbic, and prefrontal cortical networks as key nodes in the widely distributed neural networks that apparently support common religious practices such as prayer and meditation.”

This study positively thrilled me. Why? Because some of my readers have wondered; some of the atheists I’ve known have wondered; and I myself have wondered why I, a firm nonbeliever in the supernatural, read book after book and write post after post about religion. All I could figure was that I was driven to work through the childhood wounds that were inflicted on me in the name of God, yet most atheists who have been so wounded lack my interest in religion per se, so why me and not them? I even think it likely that I have a greater interest in religion than do most people who consider themselves religious. I can’t let it go, yet at the same time, whatever it is I’m searching for, it’s not God, at least by that name or in supernaturalist terms, so when I read that people with Parkinson’s appear to lose their interest in religion, I thought voila, that’s it; just as an organic process takes away their interest, it stimulates my own. 

“Aha,” some of you might say, “what is it that stimulates that part of your brain if not God?” Damned if I know, but surely you don’t mean to suggest that God favors me over most people, or that he’s more interested in me than in people with “neo-striatal, limbic, and prefrontal cortical” brain damage; and surely you realize that a mad scientist could take any of us and make us into entirely different people by rewiring our brains. There is no us apart from organic components and processes, all of which are subject to injury and disease. Our own identities, even to the deepest recesses of our thoughts and feelings, are no less organically based than the identity of a dog, an amoeba, or even a rock. Cause and effect reigns supreme, and we are its playthings. This can only mean that cause and effect is the nearest thing there is to a God, and that we have no choice about whether we worship it, or something else, or nothing at all. Or such is my long considered opinion, an opinion that gained a degree of validation from this study.

*http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671825/

At least we're not like our parents

Peggy is afraid of grocery stores (also spiders and airplanes, including airplanes that fly over her head). Grocery stores aren’t usually a problem because I do the shopping. Two weeks ago, our friends Lee and Robin brought their new baby for a visit, and Lee also brought a pie he baked. Peggy decided that I should go buy ice cream for the pie, but I didn’t want to go. Because I usually would have gone, Peggy asked a second time before she knew I was serious, after which she went, and no more was said about it. This caused me to think about what would have happened had Peggy’s father told Peggy’s mother that he didn’t want to go to the store (or do anything else she ordered him to do, for ordered it was). Let’s just say that the festivities would have gone to hell in a hand-basket.

Peggy and I have always been fixated on me not being like my mentally ill father and her not being like her mentally ill mother, and if we’ve done nothing else in life, I think we’ve succeeded in that. To this, you might ask, “What would have happened had your mother asked your father to go buy ice cream?” We were seldom out of ice cream, and my parents never had guests anyway except for my half-sister Anne and her husband, Bill, so it probably wouldn’t have come up. If it had, my father was fond enough of Anne and Bill, that I think he would have gone, probably in Bill’s car with Bill driving (Dad’s own vehicle stayed dirty and every seat but his own stayed loaded with tools), but, generally speaking, Dad felt that he had to stand up for his independence to an extent that caused people to consider him unkind and unreasonable if not downright disturbed. I considered him all three. When things are really bad between us, Peggy and I can at least look at one another and think about how much worse-off we would be if we had married someone like the other’s father or mother.     

While thinking about my father just now, I remembered how he had spent his entire 85 years believing himself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. For all but the last two of those years, he lived in the South, mostly the rural South, carrying within himself his shameful secret without knowing that anyone else had ever felt as he did, that is until one day during the ‘60s—my father was 56 at the time—when Life Magazine ran an article about a transsexual named Jan. I’m sad that my father waited ten years to tell me how that story—which I too had read—affected him, but at least he told me. If he had done like most white people in the South, he would have cancelled Life a year or two earlier when it started to portray the region as overrun with mean-spirited ignorant bigots (which was true, although they preferred to call themselves “Christian patriots”). If he had done that, he might have never discovered that he wasn’t alone, and if he hadn’t discovered that he wasn’t alone, he might have never found the courage to tell me about his transexuality, and I might have never been able to forgive him for the way he treated his family. Mostly forgive him anyway.

Pain and Pot

I wrote a month ago about some digging I was doing, and how well I seemed to be tolerating it. Well, that came to an end, and as a result of that work, I’m in constant pain, especially in my right shoulder which grinds with every movement and often feels as if it’s about to slip out of joint. I was prepared for the pain, but I wasn’t prepared for the noises and the loss of motion that makes everyday activities (opening blinds, making beds, lifting a coffee cup) angst-laden and downright scary.

Marijuana is the only drug that helps much (both with my pain and my attitude), and it’s the only drug that doesn’t put me in fear for my life (the chart only lists a smattering of the side-effects of my current narcotic), so I’ve been high pretty much all day everyday for weeks. The pot relaxes me, although it also makes my mind leave the vicinity of my body rather easily. For example, I took my first hit of some new bud while making breakfast yesterday, and immediately wanted to listen to music. There I was in the kitchen recalling that the iPod was in Peggy’s room when, voila!, I was holding the remote to her iPod player. Unless thought alone moved that remote, I had gone to her room and gotten it, yet I had no memory of doing so, and it wasn’t even what I wanted. “Oh, well,” I said to myself (it’s good to stay relaxed at such times because the other option is to feel as if a malevolent force had yanked your brain right out of your head and buried it) as I poured honey on Peggy’s oats, forgetting that Peggy doesn’t like honey on her oats. 

These are extreme examples, but they point to the nature of marijuana-induced forgetfulness. What I usually find is that when I want to concentrate, I can (sometimes better than normal), but when I’m doing mindless chores, my thoughts are more likely to be somewhere other than on the task at hand. This is good in that it makes boring work agreeable, but it also means that I can’t hold myself to quite so high a performance standard because I’m really not “all there.” As for work that requires concentration, I can conduct business, balance the checkbook, use power tools, and figure out how to get back into my Blog when Google locks me out. I’m high as I write this blogpost, so you can see that the drug doesn’t make me altogether stupid. In fact, it can make me smarter, at least in understanding my own perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Sometimes, I won’t even know I’m mentally or emotionally stuck until I use marijuana, and I feel as if I’m standing in a room dimly-lit by the setting sun on a gray day, when suddenly a huge bank of fluorescent lights come on. 

Being high on a relatively innocuous drug is hardly the worst of the possibilities when my desperation to do real work (meaning physical work) has resulted in my inability to do so much as drink coffee without pain. If the choice is between being high versus being in more pain than need be and despondent to-boot, I’ll choose being high. It’s a strange way to live, but with luck, my shoulders will recover somewhat, and I can become active again. If not, I’ll probably become active again anyway because I don’t do well with sitting around.

Please wire money

Have I mentioned that Brewsky is the brains behind this blog? That’s right, he’s the dirty little drugged-out, lazy-ass, nihilistic, philandering atheist dip-shit who is an affront to all that is decent, whereas Peggy and I are perfectly delightful people who faithfully attend—and give generously to—The Church of the Holy Bejesus of the Misconception, Mississippi Synod. My sole contribution to this blog is to type what Brewsky tells me, and he only needs me for that because he hasn’t been able to locate a keyboard for cats. If he ever does, he says he will run his own affairs via the Internet and have us declared incompetent so he can take control of our money (if you want loyalty, get a dog).

  

However, I’m writing this post to ask for your help because Brewsky is in the hospital. We took him to the Pussy Galore Emergency Medical Facility and Sanitarium at 4:00 this morning when he sneezed slightly. His first vet demonstrated complete incompetence by asking about his other symptoms. “He sneezed!” Peggy screamed. “Would you ask an unmarried pregnant teenager who had been cut in three pieces by a train what her other symptoms were?! For God’s sakes, either save our cat or get somebody who can!” Let me tell you, that vet disappeared out of the room so fast you would have thought that she was being spanked with a veterinary board. Her last words were, “Don’t go nowhere; I’m sending in the clinic’s MMTB specialist.”  

We had no idea what she was talking about, but we really liked the next vet all the same. His name was Dr. Pander (one of the techs said that his parents named him after a Liechtensteinian Polar Bear), and he got right down to business by running a credit check and a discovery of assets. When they came back satisfactory, he started an IV, ordered a gazillion x-rays, a half-dozen blood-tests, three stool cultures, two MRIs, a CAT Scan (ha), a bariatric enema, and a couple of other tests that we had never heard of, a ScrLk and a PrtScn. Once he saw the results, he shook his head sadly and said that Brewsky had ACD (Advanced Cannabinoid Dementia) from second-hand smoke and would need a four-month hospitalization in ICU followed by a year of outpatient therapy.

We were desperate to know what Brewsky’s chances were, and were comforted when the doctor assured us that if we had the money to spend, he was 200% certain that he could save our cat. Now, we just have to raise $23,999.99 for a down payment on Brewsky’s treatment, and that’s where you come in. Please don’t make us beg because the moneys not for us; it’s for him. Otherwise, we would be glad to beg because that’s just the kind of people we are.