The View From Afar
    
Harry T. Cook


By Harry T. Cook
3/11/16
 
 
This essay is being composed with a somber Schumann piece playing in the background and photos of my five grandchildren on three sides. The thinking is going something like this: What if the deity imagined by theists actually sees all, hears all and has a hand in all things?
 
Either theism's deity is ignoring the mayhem and chaos directly attributable to human beings or is toting up the score against a day of judgment when the malefactors of great wealth, the agents of genocide and the just plain careless will be called to account.
 
Many religious groups teach the latter option, viz. justice delayed, which may be justice denied. But they've worked that out, too. Those who die before they are judged and condemned will have their day before the judgment seat as they find themselves not only dead but on their way to the everlasting crematory -- kind of like the burning bush that is not consumed but forever ablaze.
 
The long look from afar beholds a planet wreathed in weather-changing chemical offal, the monuments of ancient civilizations being razed by religious zealots, whole nations at 24/7/365 unending war, millions of human beings barely surviving at the edge of starvation with no end in sight while others' Smaug-like pelf grows exponentially.
 
Is it simply that the false hopes of Eden have long since been dashed by the reality of human nature? It is said that King David had it all, that is until he saw a woman not his wife bathing in the nude. So he didn't have it all until he took the rest at the expense of martyring her husband. The child of that assignation is said to have lived less than a week, therefore no name was ever conferred on him -- "name" in the biblical world means the character and nature of the one who bears it. So he was a nobody.
 
The world is heavily populated by children that essentially have no names because they barely have life, and a typically short and brutish one at that. This is a very dark place in the view from afar. However, our domestic discontents tend to such tragedies as too many TV reruns, or fast-food joints that are not fast enough, or that the Chicago Cubs never win the World Series, or that taxes are too high, or that government is too big but is also not doing enough for the discontented.
 
As the poet-philosopher who gave us the 39th psalm said, "And now, Yahweh, what is our hope?" The question is answered promptly: "Truly, my hope is in thee."
 
The "where is our hope" part seems clear. It is born of deep uncertainty about how to live in a world of garish monotony, on the one hand, and in the wasteland of human life barely surviving, on the other. The answer that our hope is in Yahweh makes one look aloft and ask, "How long?"
 
Therein is the major difficulty. Aside from the theological Lego sets upon which religions try to build their certitudes are the numerous realities that mock hope altogether. "It is what it is," says the philosopher of pragmatism. "Live with it as best you can. It's a jungle out there. Get them before they get you."
 
These are troubling thoughts to articulate with the faces of five beautiful grandchildren looking down on the writer.
 
My late friend, the humanist Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, wrote: "Where is my hope? My hope is in me. My hope is in me, and in you, and in you." As many times as I have heard those words, I have wondered what he meant by "you." Maybe the congregation he founded and led for more than 40 years. Maybe the wider community his amazing message had radicalized.
 
Then quite apart from any other person, I think of the quasi-mythical Jesus and of his exaltation by the church over the last 2,000 years. It is said that he died to save believers from their sins, which, of course they and we continue to commit largely with impunity -- an idea that is difficult to process through the grid of reason.
 
What we human beings have done and are doing to one another as well as to the only planet on which we can survive cause me to wonder how the saving thing can work absent a terrific effort on the part of the perpetrators. We cannot afford another Syria. We cannot abide the oppression and slaughter of whole races of people. We cannot keep doing what we've always done and expect to get anything beyond what we've always got.
 
The author of the Epistle of James (see your New Testament near the back of the book) put it as piquantly as anyone ever has: "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead."
 
And so it will be for the human race and its place in the sun. Not tomorrow. Not next month or year. But sooner than you'd wish. As another denizen of the New Testament put it, "Who shall deliver me from this body of death?" Would that he had meant "what" shall deliver him. That "what" is works, not faith -- at least not faith alone.


Copyright 2016 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 


Readers Write
Re essay of 3/4/16 Informed Choice, Privacy and Civility
 
Mark Bendure, Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan:
Thank you for another inspiring Friday morning message. I agree with most of what you had to say about the unnecessarily continuing litigation over abortion rights. While there is much of America that would benefit from greater female involvement and leadership, it is quite a leap to suggest that this manifests a "war on women." Apart from a few slow-to-learn Neanderthals (okay, more than a few) the opposition to abortion comes from people of principle, usually fueled by their devout religious beliefs or by sincere difficulties reconciling women's undoubted right to control their bodies with the authority to deal "death" to another "life." While I ultimately come down on the pro-choice side of the coin, I can understand the zeal and sincerity of the other side to continue to press its point. I think the Supreme Court has admirably refused to overturn Roe despite having a majority of Justices who would likely ban abortion if it was their call. In the process the courts have tried to steer a middle course, giving each side something to like about the law, and something to dislike, leaving it up to the local citizenry to decide on details of regulation which must be "reasonable" and based on a "legitimate interest" to withstand scrutiny. This emphasizes the fact that both sides that are passionate about the issue must be vigilant as lines in the sand get redrawn to one side or the other.
 
Robert Prahl, St. Charles, Missouri:
Bravo on your Informed Choice article.
 
Joel Pugh, Dallas, Texas:
Texas abortion clinic "rules to protect women" are a farce. Complications from abortions are in the less then 1% range, whereas complications from colonoscopies and other "day clinic" surgeries are far higher. Yet, hallways in abortion clinics must be 8' so gurneys can pass -- only in the abortion clinics. Similarly stupid, only abortion doctors must have privileges at area hospitals -- another barrier. The Supremes are essentially supposed to decide if these capricious rules are "barriers" -- in that they caused 95% of the clinics to close, a ruling that they are "not barriers" would stink of prejudice. Thanks for your essay.
 
Rev. Carolyn Woodall, Viking, Alberta, Canada:
Men cannot have children. Women can have children through artificial insemination, but men are dependent on women for the continuance of the human race in general, and their own progeny specifically. Pun aside, I think that scares the bejesus out of some folk, always has. Truly I believe this is an effort to be in control of something that is beyond their control. In the U.S., that manifests itself in this attack on women's reproductive rights, in Saudi Arabia it manifests itself as the limitations on women's movements so that a woman's body 'belongs' to the men in her family -- same desire for control, based on the same primal fear -- that one's offspring will not survive in the gene pool. By the way, such fear is present in the animal kingdom, too -- male lions will kill any cubs that they think are not their own, so females keep their young away from males and mate with several males in their area, in the hope that a male coming into contact with her young will believe the young are his -- and he will let them live.
 
Bitsy Pickens, Anderson, South Carolina:
I love the way your mind works!
 
Gloria Pelham, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:
A "war on women?" Really? How about a war on women who too easily put aside their God-given maternal nature for any number of reasons, many having to do with convenience? Go to confession.
 
Cynthia Chase, Laurel, Maryland:
"Protecting" women from making their own choices is a diversion that turns attention away from the real scandals in this country -- that thousands of kids in our country go to bed hungry, get killed by stray bullets in their own neighborhoods, drink lead-laced water, lack proper health and dental care, attend substandard schools, etc. 
 
Jim High, Tupelo, Mississippi:
The abortion issue is a religious fight pure and simple. Religious nuts think that if a woman has the right to an abortion then she is defying the will of their God. Abortion, however, is not the real problem. Their view of God is the problem. God is not the Supernatural Being in the sky who created our world, had a Son, and wrote a book. What they worship and call God is actually just the Process of Life evolving into higher and higher forms of Itself throughout the entire universe where ever the conditions are right for life to develop.
 
Fred Fenton, Concord, California:
I applaud your strong stand in favor of Roe v. Wade and women's right to control their own bodies. My mother, a pioneer woman doctor and committed Christian, worked to save the lives of poor women who tried abortion without medical help when abortion was illegal. Each time she failed, and her patient died, my mother despaired of a law that discriminated against poor women who could not afford to obtain an abortion by traveling to another country or paying a doctor willing to break the law.
 
The Rev. G. Green, Kenosha, Wisconsin:
Thank you for your recent essay on truth. I have long considered Pilate's question to Jesus, "what is truth", to be among the most profound in the scriptures. Those three simple words can send us on a lifelong quest for credible answer no matter how temporary each answer may be.
 
Larry Peplin, Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan:
I haven't written in a while but I want you to be assured, for what it's worth, that your Friday essays have become something that I truly look forward to every week.
 
A Quotation from Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B sent on to us by a friend:
I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth.

What do you think?
I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me at revharrytcook@aol.com.