“The Man upstairs, if any, will be kind to me. Never mention God to me again.”

Our fisherman-neighbor on Cape Cod was packing 550 pounds of squid he’d just caught, and this was his reply to my asking him how it is between him and God. The occasion, last summer, was my commiserating with him on the suicide-death of his son…

….and, in the same cavalier conceit that God, “if any,” is grandfatherly-indulgent rather than fatherly-disciplinary, at the funeral of a scoundrel I picked up the buzz that “He’s gone to a better place.”

How did the pink cloud of this sentimental amorality descend upon us?

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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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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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More and more as his youthful beard grew longer, Sergei Torop doubtless heard, “You look like Jesus!” He could step cleanly into a thousand paintings of Jesus as a strikingly handsome Northern European, the living image of a false face (since Jesus was Near Eastern). We should not be surprised that he spends much of his time painting.

If we don’t block our narcissistic tendency, what people think of us will become the mold into which we pour the liquid plastic of our self-perception. Sergei didn’t watch it, and inwardly became a plastic Jesus with the unbiblical character which that Northern European image entails.

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That “more than 4 in 10 Americans have switched their religious affiliation since childhood or dropped out of any formal religious group” is more “a mark of the health of American religion” than of its sickness.

1.....In the history of our land of freedom, religion is one of the social currents that ebb and flow. While Yale was founded primarily to produce Christian ministers, the student body of the year 1800 had not even one professing Christian. But after a series of “awakenings,” before century’s end Yale and America were overwhelmingly Christian. Today, dropping “out of any formal religious group” is the most noticeable phenomenon. Tomorrow?

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