“On Faith” is a serious game. It’s a GAME, a contrived microcosm of real life. Each week a Sally-and-Jon-shaped question rains down on the roofs of us panelists and dries up or flows down on our appreciative and/or critical side. And it’s SERIOUS. The questions—on religion’s borders with all of human life--are consequential for personal and public decision-making.

That’s four possibilities. When the rain hits, (1) it dries up: the panelist feels uninvested and does not post. Or (2) the rain flows down both sides of the roof: the panelist posts a YES/NO. Or (3) the post is a NO: the rain flows down only on the critical side of the roof. Or (4) the post is a YES: the rain flows down only on the appreciative side of the roof.

Like life, this "On Faith" game is complicated and messy. Panelists and commenters are—according to their mood and situation at the moment—cool/warm/hot. And posts are off the surface or from the depths of mind (reason) and heart (feeling).

This week’s question presents a double event, namely, a prayer and a protest. My response (in light of all the above) is a double YES.

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This question is and is not a laughing matter: “Are physicians’ primary obligations to their patients or their religious convictions?”

A laughing matter: The question’s secular-antireligious bias is blatant. Maturely religious physicians have so integrated their religious and occupational “professions” that what is good for their patients is understood within the particular physician’s way of seeing and living in the world. Further, the bias naively assumes that what is good for the patient can be objectively known, confining the religious factor to the inferior realm of subjectivity. The question does not occur where what is good for the patient -- for example, stopping the flow of blood from a wound -- can be objectively known.

NOT a laughing matter: Some religious traditions dogmatically exclude or severely restrict some generally accepted medical procedures. For example, Christian Science and Roman Catholicism. For the births of our children, my wife and I avoided Roman Catholic hospitals out of fear that she would die and I would leave the hospital with a neonate and no wife.

But more fundamental than the partly hypothetical question driving a wedge between medicine and religion is the fact that religion and medicine are only superficially and secondarily in conflict. They are siblings, born of the common human desire to improve the human condition. Of course siblings occasionally fuss at one another, but their dustups do not erode their sibling identity. Historically, an outstanding instance of their cooperatioin is the fact that Christianity has been the primary hospital-builder to the world.

Two practical matters:

1 Medical institutions should accommodate the consciences of particular physicians, for both medical efficiency and religious freedom.

2 As in America we have the mutual freedom of "church and state," we should have also the mutual freedom of medicine and law. Government should stay out of doctors' offices and operating rooms.

What’s wrong with me? “Not a problem,” some “On Faith” commenters would say and without hesitation have told me. More thoughtful, a cognitive therapist would muck about in my ideas to find the one labeled “Mail System Error: This message was undeliverable….” The therapy indicated? Get me unblocked, so communication can continue.

I can imagine a cognitive therapist asking me, “What passage or verse in scripture or literature best defines your own faith or beliefs? Why?” That’s fishing not for where I’m blocked but where my spirit is flowing free, confident, joyful, hopeful for myself and for everybody.

“Own” is the spear point of the this-week’s questions coming down from “On Faith” above upon the pates of us panelists. My “own” is more than what I profess and possess. It is what “owns,” possesses, me. And without hesitation I can say what that is. Rather, who that is. And I shall answer, as directed, with a quotation:

“G0D, who commanded light to shine forth out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Jesus Christ.” (New Testament: 2 Corinthians 4:6)

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“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Abortion and same-gender equality--are they small stuff? “Small” signals that the question’s category is size. When conversations hit a question of size, I frequently recall my father the judge saying,“In comparison with what?”

The longer you stare at something, the bigger it gets. Not in your eyes but in your mind. It’s the psychology of attention. If it makes you sick, it’s the pathology of attention.

An ancient prayer for wisdom put it this way: “Lord, give us a right judgment in all things.” Proportion. Balance. Reality. Truth. Fairness. Justice. Yes, intelligent Love. This Peace Prayer was influential in ending Europe’s Thirty-Years' War and Britain’s Puritan/Restoration bitterness: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Essentials are big stuff; non-essentials are small stuff; and mutual love prevents differences of sorting from becoming hot-button destroyers of community.

As a Christian, I am saddened, distressed, even frightened by Christians who sicken their minds and societies by single-issue passionate polemic for or against something, anything, whatever. Jesus came preaching “gospel” (Middle English for “good news”), and some of my Christian brothers and sisters moralize the gospel down to their notions of proper behavior and politicize it to their petitions for the use of public power to force their points of view on all who disagree with them. We Christians can’t use the excuse that “Everybody does it”: Jesus didn’t do it.

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Faith and doubt are the legs on which the collective human mind walks.

While faith and doubt are not in dialectical tension inside each of us as individuals—some of us are faith all the way down, some are unbelief all the way down—human groups progress in human values by faith-doubt conversations among their members. Such groups walk on two legs, one marked FAITH and the other DOUBT.

Some of the most creative and humanly useful among us—men and women who are obviously good news to humanity—are inwardly as free to doubt as they are to believe...

...free to DOUBT. Most of the hell in the world is produced by human beings who have no doubt that they are right, that what they believe is not only true but certain, and that any who disagree with them are not only wrong but evil. And if they call upon heaven-or-earth authorities to ratify their convictions, the news they produce is apt to be even worse. But also...

...free to BELIEVE. Mother Teresa believed that on the faces of the dying in the gutters of Calcutta she saw the face of Jesus, a face that was to her—as a Christian—a call to relieve their body-and-soul suffering.

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