Political Humor

An Epistle on Religion

I have for some years now harbored a secret love for Janeane Garofalo. It's just one of those things, as Cole Porter so aptly said. When, some years into my schoolboy infatuation, she started broadcasting on 'Air America', the left-wing radio syndicate which her program makes tolerable, it was almost as if I could feel the silky left hand of fate beck me like a wayward child toward her bosom. I mean 'bosom' in the sense of 'The security and closeness likened to being held in a warm familial embrace' (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed.), not in the sense of warm, soft breasts upthrust by the reach of her arms twining around my neck, drawing us into the thirst-quenching embrace for which we have so long yearned. Scratch that, read 'I have so long yearned', let's be scrupulously clear about this thing. As far as I know, Janeane Garofalo knows not and cares not if I live or die, and for that matter she's probably dating some golden-haired Swedish Greenpeace activist. Damn him.

But this affection is not so far-fetched as it might at first appear. I'm getting to the religion part, show some patience, you enlightenment-thirsty swine. Ms. Garofalo is a close friend of Ben Stiller, the comedic actor perhaps best known for making Luke Wilson look taller. I count myself (and this may be base flattery, but I love the man) a friend of Ben Stiller's designated producer, Stuart Cornfeld; in the capacity of wasting Stuart's time I have beguiled many an hour at his offices, where Mr. Stiller also can be found weekdays, reading his mail or rubbing wax into raisins, a nervous habit he shares with Zbigniew Brzezinski. Thus I met Ben Stiller. Again the hand of fate guides me, whisper-light/ toward the fearsome object of my heart's delight. Yes, it's rhyming couplets, I've got it bad. However, there's more. Ms. Garofalo appeared in a movie you haven't seen yclept 'Mystery Men'; she co-starred with the estimable William H. Macy, who is perhaps best known for doing his own stunts in the motion picture 'Fargo'. I met Mr. Macy once on the Universal Studios backlot; people on the tram tour were waving and calling and as I happened to be walking next to him, I waved and called back. We had a good laugh about that, and then he knocked me down with a rubber Oscar statuette borrowed from the prop department. There are further skeins that seem to coil about myself and the indomitable she-elf of liberal talk radio: we both shop at Trader Joe's, we have both tried to beat traffic by cutting down San Vicente Boulevard, to no avail; we are both prone to respiratory illnesses, and we have both petted aging pugs and washed our hands afterwards to get the dog cheese off our fingers. I daresay in other ways our paths have crossed, back and forth until they are woven together like a pair of woven paths. And yet, it's all in my head, just like my parole officer says.

It is just this way with God. Once a person gets the notion of an interested or personal god into his or her mind, evidences of the divine seem to crop up everywhere. Coincidence, such as the time I trolled the lunch buffet at an Indian restaurant on Melrose only three days before Ms. Garofalo went to the Chinese restaurant two blocks west, suddenly takes on the significance of a mystical portent. The shapes of clouds, a notice posted on the wall of the oil change place, the disappearance of a sock from a load of laundry that never for one instant left your sight: these things become abodements of a higher power coyly peeping through the Venetian blinds of reality to see if you can take a hint. Now if one were to put aside the idea of god and yet retain the occult aspect of things, one could turn easily enough to divination, otherwise known as areolation: acultomancy, cleidomancy, selenomancy and its trick cousin catoptromancy, icthyomancy, the challenging art of scatomancy, or if you have some frogs to hand, batraquomancy; but this sort of thing doesn't let a fellow in on the Big Plan, the Divine Mystery. It's rather like reading bits torn out of a book for free when one might read the entire thing by subscription. Either way, the idea is to find out how it ends.

Why do people need religion at all? I mean other than to get on the Creator's good side, in case he's got a long memory. As noted in the first part of this epic peregrination through the wilderness of faith, man or Man seeks some reassurance that there is the slightest bit of purpose or meaning to his existence. And same man, or the taller man standing to his left, wants to know whether the universe 'just happened' or if somebody planned the whole thing out; and if so, did he lose the instructions? That man's wife, meanwhile, would like to know if there is life after death, and if so, will the Kirschners be there? Because she can't stand Mrs. Kirschner. The questions we hold, the purposes we assign to religion fall into a general topic called 'theology' which can be broken into a few steaming chunks as follows:

Theology: the existence and nature of God

Revealed Theology: does God exist for me? And if so, how much?

Anthropology: what is man?

Soteriology: how can my soul be saved? Do I have to save the whole thing?

Thanatology: what comes after death?

Armed with these simple concepts, mankind has nearly rendered himself extinct time and time again. But it is useful to understand that the very nature of God has occupied a great deal of human thought, and as it says on the side of the box, "results may vary".

Also in the previous installment (if you haven't read it yet, it's a corker for sheer word count alone) I made note of the fact that I am a Buddhist, and went on to explain in terms so simple only a child could understand them how the Buddhist notion of becoming an empty vessel into which life could flow unimpeded every moment would allow one to become, for lack of a less threadbare term, 'one with the universe'. This one-ness, or 'godhead', as it is also known, was originally intended to serve a Hindu concept that Scrabble lovers call 'panentheism', or the existence of God through the collective nature of all things, as well as outside all things. This is otherwise known as the 'All in God' doctrine, or in street slang, 'monistic theism'. For this purpose, what you need to understand (and if you do, you're ahead of me) is that this concept places God within everything, and everything within God.

Now a Christian, even a relatively alert one, will tend to scoff at this idea. According to 'theist' Christian doctrine (the word 'doctrine' means 'a principle or principles set forth for belief or acceptance', from the Latin 'doctrina', meaning 'horse doping'), God is just the one cat, although confusingly divided into three persons, and independent of His creation, although he takes an active interest in the doings; theism is distinct from 'deism', wherein God set things up and then walked away, probably in disgust, and refuses to even crack the door to see how his wee little folk are getting along. And just as well, too. We have made a hash of it. So far, so good. But mankind's relationship with God, Gods, or whatever the Prime Mover can be said to be, is like a shattered mirror. It's been shivered into a million little bits, each reflecting the same thing. There's Narayana, pantheism, polytheism, henotheism (many gods, but I choose that one), dualism, its grandchild Manichaeism, the one god out of many out of one that comprise Brahman, and hundreds more variations, including good old Taoism, toward which scientific discovery seems ever to be advancing: a kind of formless metaphysical Yes and No from which come all and nothing. I said these all reflect the same thing, like bits of a broken mirror. But what is it? An immense asparagus? Cthulu? Charleton Heston? Nay. Reflected in all gods is one form: Man himself. Kapow!

Which leads me back to the delectable she-badger, Janeane Garofalo. No, sorry, Buddha. Buddha, who for the record was a relatively lean individual, probably similar in the beam to Ghandi, (the roly-poly gink with whom Buddha is associated is in fact a Buddhist monk that achieved Buddahood during the Liang Dynasty in China name of Pu-Tai) was wait, I lost the thread of my own sentence. Start again. Buddha was (okay, I'm back at the controls) not making any explicit proposition about the nature of God. This may be the primary reason that Buddhism seems to take root in such odd places, without the slightest missionary influence, similar to those Chinese doughnut shops. It's something one happens upon, and some little valve inside the old noggin goes 'click' and one starts pursuing the subject, fervently or not, but pleasingly free of the threat of some cranky old bearded party hovering around behind the nearest cumulonimbus waiting to sling a thunderbolt or a blistering case of shingles or whatnot if we put a foot wrong. Buddhism is a trail of bread crumbs. And what you discover after a decade or two of following them around is it's not so much a trail as it is an even coating, like cosmic Shake n' Bake. Evidences of the Way are everywhere you look. Then you realize there is no trail; the answer is right where you're standing, and it always has been, and there isn't any answer in the first place: without ourselves, god cannot exist, subjectively speaking; nor ourselves without god, objectively speaking. The punch line here is of course that we may not exist in any case, because whatever proofs we have that we do exist, we only have because we think we exist in the first place. In other words, the whole thing may just be a terrible misunderstanding. This is catnip to a pseudointellectual like me. Buddha had the good sense not to put a dog in that fight. What is, is. What is not, is not. How the hell would you know? Best not to presume.