Danny Doom’s Booze Cabinet

My old favorite: the problem of evil. I never seem to be able to get past it, since late nights in freshman year of college, arguing over the merits or existence of a god that allows such misery.

“God protected this campus,� one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.�

It’s from another long article in The New Yorker, but worth the time. “Holiday in Hellmouth.”

During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility.

Some interesting thoughts from Albert Einstein on god and religion from 1954:

“The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

And like your humble narrator, Einstein, a Jewish man, prefers to see people as equals, not as divided by individual religions:

“And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.”

Is such thought even possible in today’s society of warring philosophies and jihads? Does anyone dare entertain it?

Here’s one way to even it all out: everybody is wrong. Nobody has any idea what they are talking about. And no one ever will. It seems more than a bit silly to hold such strong convictions about that which you just don’t know, much less go to war over it. So I am here to assure you: your stories are interesting, but no more factual than any other stories. If that works for you, fine, but don’t think that you’ve cornered the market on faith.

I have faith in the Cubs this year, just like I did last year. See how this works? It doesn’t!

Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate for president has to assure voters that’s he’s not a Muslim; as if the problems of racism aren’t enough in some particularly backward parts of the country.