I’m back! Let the celebration begin.

Admittedly, I’ve been AWOL lately. For one thing, I’m juggling three book clubs along with a long list of other literary works demanding my attention. Like a kid in a candy store, I grab more delights than I can possibly consume. Thus, my blog output has suffered. That is hardly a crisis given that so few read these repositories of personal wisdom. Still, I’m not ready to cease writing totally.

My short- term solution is to focus on random thoughts that flit through what passes for my brain. Over time, I have found such dialogues with myself fascinating. I keep thinking … Tom, you are a clever sot. However, I seriously doubt anyone else would agree.

Note Bene: Unlike my previous series exploring aspects of my sordid past life, there likely will be little to connect the next bundle of posts into coherent themes, but who knows. Some will be short, others long. Most will be inane, though a few might have merit. After all, profundity (much like profanity) is in the eye of the beholder.

A Spiritual Conundrum or two!

As you know, I was a believer in Christianity in my youth … Catholicism to be more precise. I tried hard to be a true believer, though I would argue with several of the Catholic tenets to which I was exposed in my High School religion classes even as I was being inexorably drawn into the seminary. There was always a war between rationality and a need to believe in something beyond myself.

I do not denigrate that innate need. It is fundamental to the human experience for most of us. Creation myths, for example, are universal. Assigning meaning to forces beyond our experience is fundamental. Personalizing that force is understandable. Few of us can embrace the abstractions demanded by a rational approach to things.

In my war between reason and faith, certain insights (or perhaps doubts) intruded. While anything is possible, not everything struck me as plausible. A prime example is that a personal deity cares about me and whether or not I believe in him, her, it. Not just belief but a total acceptance of rules laid out in writings set down long after the events took place (the Bible), texts selected by a committee (ever served on a Committee?) and then changed many times as the original works were retranslated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin and then English. Astonishingly, failure to follow the rules results in everlasting pain. Such a harsh and unforgiving God! Let’s look closer at this.

As the above meme suggests, why would a grand creator (or force) focus on an insignificant species on a remote planet hidden among so many galaxies … a species that has only been around for mere moments in our cosmological timepiece.

And why would this force, one that presumably created this vast galaxy some 13.8 billion years ago (if reason and science are to be embraced) care one wit about what one single member out of some 8 billion humans does on a daily basis. What benefit to such a force if these miserable creatures petition it for respite from their petty problems. And why would this force take attendance at weekly ceremonies devoted to the adoration of a concept well beyond man or woman’s understanding. It just doesn’t compute.

You would think that a force (I can’t anthroporphize this notion by saying being) would have better things to do. After all, the above meme only encompasses our galaxy, the Milky Way which, in truth, is comprized of some 50 galaxies in what is defined as our Local Group. Astoundingly, there are billions upon billions of such galaxies, as many as two trillion by some count. And that figure only applies to the known universe which keeps getting larger as our technologies permit us to look further into time and space.

Now, if we assume that our Miky Way is an average galaxy, astronomers estimate that there are 200 trillion billion stars out there. Given other estimates of the number of earth sized planets seen in other solar systems, there may be 40 billion earths out there (likely a low guess). Of course, we would like to think we are unique, God’s chosen species if you will. But really, the odds are we are not alone, even if we are the product of mere evolution (which requires an immense number of fortuitous events to take place) and not divine intervention. Only arrogance and unsupportable hubris would lead us to conclude that we are the only conscious species in the cosmos.

Even decades ago, when the known universe was much smaller, these facts about the cosmos in which we exist served to humble me. I am not arrogant enough to discard all possibilities that a force or phenomenon beyond ordinary human comprehension may explain our amazing world. At the same time, the simple creation myths provided by several religious traditions and the very notion of a personal deity looking over my miserable existence seem wholly implausible. I cannot fathom a deity that would create such a vast and magnificent universe only to care about one struggling species on one planet stuck in the backwater of a single galaxy. Really?

Such conundrums demand additional noodling. You can be assured that I will return to this question.