Most of the Christians I know seem to be like the woman Joseph Addison described, who, "is so good a Christian that whatever happens to herself is a trial, and whatever happens to her neighbors is a judgment." Or they seem to suit Ambrose Bierce's definition of a Christian as "One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor," or the alternative definition, "One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin." I remember being 5 or 6 years old and talking my parents out of their Sunday trips to the Episcopalian church. I wanted to stay home and play, rather than sit in the hard-backed chairs and sing songs, and even then I could tell they went only out of obligation, mixed with a sense of social climbing.

On their own, such people are silly or mildly offensive. When they enter the political and social arena en masse, their totem, tribal, racial, and aggressive cults can be deadly. That's why the great monotheisms are better known to the world for their brutal crusades and internecine bloodletting than for their supposed gospels of love and redemption.

"Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying had produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
-- Tom Paine

         There are two ideas that ought to be kept separate. The one is my faith (or anyone's) and the other is the rational critique (by me or anyone) of the Christian Gospel and the practical consequences of it in history. That critique doesn't imply some arrested development of adolescent rebellion. Not every non-Christian from a Christian home is locked into a "no-I-won't-go-to-church" temper tantrum. An atheist may be blocked by personal traumas or other psychological factors from faith. He or she may lack the "bump of veneration" (as the phrenologists used to call it). A devout Hindu, on the other hand, certainly has no shortage of faith. Yet both can read, say, the Book of Genesis and notice the two irreconcilable accounts of the creation that are in it.

         For most of my youth, I was an agnostic, shading toward atheism. In modern America being "not a Christian" is as far as most people can see when you tell them you're not one.

         I found occasional peace and solace in my younger years in certain places of faith -- Catholic mass, mainly for the calm confidence that comes of ritual and deep history; but also Quaker meetings, which are in my family history, and the Unitarian-Universalist church, which really transcends creed and does not require faith in some invisible, all-powerful deity. But I never joined any of them and never went to any one for very long. Whether I believed or not, I felt, was between me and God, or the gods, or the lack of them, but everyone else seemed to want to make it their business. I lived in a place and time where Christianity is something that follows me around the streets, urging poorly written tracts on me and shouting, "He died for your sins!" My stint as an editorial page editor also involved me on a daily basis with the most brutal, stupid and aggressive form of Christians, of all denominations. In the political life of my community, every species of bigotry takes its sword and shield from the "inerrant Word of God," and all manner of destructive stupidity and personal grudge flows into the social and political process under cover of "the unalterable law of the creator."

         So calling attention to the warts and knots of the Bible, became a function of the practical aspect of my life. Once people become convinced they have access to absolute truth, with no test in reality, sooner or later they will begin to act on it. It doesn't matter if you're Christian or not. The bricks of Treblinka were formed of that kind of faith. But if you're one of those "I am godly and unstoppable" types, I'm going to be the prick you kick against. It's not a comfortable role, and I'm always fearing I'll fight so reflexively that I'll end up trampling one of the few genuinely good souls who are on the path of Christianity, through my lack of discernment. Judaism and Islam have the same difficulties and tendencies in the modern world as Christianity. But carping at them would make me feel evil. If I lived in Tehran or Tel Aviv, I would feel otherwise. Yet I have no more inclination to embrace those faiths than I do Christianity.

         It seems unjust that I should be able to carp at your religion and not offer my own for examination. But it is also true that some faiths are personal, rather than proselytizing. And that some are rightly termed mysteries. I loathe proselytizing. As if you could sell truth door-to-door. For what I believe, there is no book that we all have read, no Bible, and if I were to attempt to describe the path I should do it poorly, for don't make it and I don't yet know where it's taking me.

         Here's as much as I can tell you. I'm still the agnostic I was in my 20s: I am hesitant to make affirmative statements about more than I have known directly, or to accept worldviews that are internally contradictory and not consistent with the facts. But I have seen and felt what I never expected, what I can only say were the works or presences of gods. I don't care to convince anyone of that. I do devotions to powers you certainly have heard of. Your church stole some of them and called them saints. Others it cast down and called devils. To some it did both, without realizing it.

         I ask. I learn what they show me. I follow what is strong; I grow what is needed; I wait for new doors to be unlocked. I learn to sift their voices from my own. The Quaker background is helpful, and in practice what I do is probably not all that different from what you do except the honey and apples and wine and barley cakes in the open groves.

         I use the gifts that I find in me, and the greatest, perhaps, is the one you also begin to use when you read those blood-curdling Old Testament stories and say, "that was a cruel thing to do" -- say it even of God, before you correct yourself. The discernment of right and wrong that can weigh even a god's actions is a holy power.

         I do not believe they "made" the world -- I do not believe it is a "made" thing. It has not the plot of novel or the tick of a watch. It is a blood-smeared squalling, snotty, wild thing; born, not made, but that requires a female first principle, and the Middle Eastern monotheisms have diligently scrubbed her out of the picture (Christianity least successfully of the three).

         They are not all-powerful, but they are in this world and also in places I can't see or understand. We work together, not as equals, assuredly, but not as tyrant and slave, either.

         What is beyond them? I don't know, and may not in this life. But I don't expect it to be the Christian God, based on what he has said of himself. I have been told we lived before and will live again, here. That, too, is a matter of faith. It changes a great many things. A true faith will not lie, but it may tell truths in forms that we can scarcely recognize at first.

         I dislike New Age bids to reconstruct ancient religions, which usually yield tin masks for pop psychology, and religions that can be no bigger than their imaginers.

         The persistent question of any belief seems to me to be the one posed in the Book of Job: why is life so nasty so often? I don't think anyone's quoted from that book for a "favorite verse" here yet. Why is life the sow that eats her farrow? The children of Egypt die of plagues even now, whether it is the work of your god or of Artemis Hekebolos. (I can comprehend it better in Artemis, since she at least does not claim to control and rule all, only her portion.)

         Any religion that offers no answer to this question, or no alternative, is inadequate to human needs. Yet no final answer is possible. This is the sun I cannot stare into without going mad and which I cannot see past. And so I turn the other direction, and see the other aspect of faith: the shadow one casts on the earth. How do you live? What does your love and skill accomplish? Is the world a better place for your having lived in it? I do not say "thou fool" to one who works in the world, for what and whom he loves. I think a religion is vain that says that. I think the bumper sticker I so often see, "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven," is a shabby coat for moral laziness.

         I empathize with a modern Christian of intellect and learning, attempting the feat of standing on faith alone. One who knows logic as a handy tool is forced to lay it aside, for faith makes no concession to reason. Yet a religion is open to question and probing, and to fall back on faith always smacks, to a thinking mind, of special pleading.

         The path I'm on now contradicts my long commitment to enlightenment rationalism and common sense. Not totally, but any swerve from that is a life-changer. I'm no longer on the same team as Ingersoll and Tom Paine and Mark Twain, though I still love them. I now believe in things I once argued against, from a logical standpoint. If confronted now with my own arguments from 10 years ago, I would have no rebuttal.

         I have to work every day to make the irrational and the rational bed down together under the same skull. That's faith. I didn't build a religion out of my ethics. Faith comes a flare through the hollow of the ear, the thing that flows in from beyond what you know and can explain. It takes you where you're afraid to go. It sent Saul into a ditch and Thomas Merton to the Little Flower. It makes my hair stand on end.

         Recently I found an insightful analysis of monotheism and its problems in a book on Hinduism. I've copies the relevant section here. It also contains, by the way, an implicit critique of the build-your-own-faith neo-paganisms that often draws people who reject American Christianity.

"God is not good, or else he could be better." -Meister Eckhart