(This is a repost.)

A while back I ventured the opinion that a young person thinking of marrying someone who doesn’t share their religious belief system would do well to carefully consider the advisability of such a match.

In response an atheist friend of mine wrote the following letter, which he thought I might share with you:

I’m a bona fide marriage expert. Not because I have some fancy Ivy League degree hanging on my wall, nor because I’m a published marriage counselor—no, I’m a marriage expert because I’ve been married twice. I’m a big believer in the school of you-don’t-know-it-until-you’ve-done-it. Having done it twice, I now know it twice as well. Hence, marriage expert.

My first marriage was to a lovely woman of like-spirituality. We were both humanists (which is a fancy term for do-gooder atheists) of Jewish descent. That marriage failed when she realized that she didn’t love me. ME! How could she not love me? You probably don’t know me, but I am very lovable. I know this, because my second wife, an even more lovely Christian woman named Rachel, told me so. Rachel also told me that our marriage is a resounding success, and I believe her. We both have no doubt that we will be together until we die, at which point we will be separated. According to her, I will go to hell and she will go to heaven—or, in my version, we will be dead. Either way, we won’t be together anymore, and that’s sad.

But how can this marriage really be a success? Rachel is a Christian and I am a heretical Jewish humanist. How can we fully be together when we don’t share the same spirituality? How can we unleash the full potential of our marriage if we have a spiritual chasm between us? How can we possibly understand each other when we approach life so differently? What will we teach the children? For Pete’s sake, think of the children! (If anyone knows Pete, or why he cares about the children, please let me know in the comments—oh, and tell him I want back my copy of ABBA Gold.)

As tempting as it was to ignore the problem of our differences and hope it went away, Rachel and I talked about it, and decided that since we valued our marriage too much to leave it to chance, we would be proactive about addressing our differences: we’d do it the hard way. What is it about Jews and Christians that they need to suffer to feel alive? Wait a minute, maybe we aren’t so different after all! No, that’s not it. We’re different. Might as well face it. We’re really, really different.

Women and men are different. Christians and people of other faiths are different. Christians of different denominations are different. Republicans and Democrats are different. Bostonians and San Diegans are different. Mice and men are different. Even Milli and Vanilli are different—in fact, they aren’t even themselves.

I am not a woman who was born in San Jose, CA, grew up on a farm in upstate New York, matured in Washington, has six siblings, and is passionate about her family and her faith. I never will be that woman, and while I can understand her, empathize with her, feel pretty in her clothes, and love her deeply, I will never really know the depths of her experiences or the convictions of her beliefs. No one will, except God (if you’re into that sort of thing). I don’t want to be her Savior, I want to be her husband. I want to spend every day getting closer to her and knowing her more, faith and all.

Everyone has faith of some kind, even atheists (we can’t prove there is no God, we simply believe there is no God). By recognizing your own faith, even if it’s belief in mammon—or as Washington Irving called it: “The Almighty Dollar”—you can understand how essential faith is to the core of our being. Everyone has the ability to relate to the fervent wholeness of faith, and to understand how it can permeate every aspect of one’s life. You don’t have to share the same faith to know how your spouse feels about their spiritual connection. It’s the universal feelings that come from faith, even if the faiths are different, that are the foundation from which you can connect, share, learn, and grow. Your marriage won’t fail over differences; there will always be differences. It will fail if you are not honest with each other, and lack respect for one another—spiritually or otherwise.

Marriage is a partnership. Each partner brings the best and the worst parts of themselves to their marriage, and the success or failure of their union depends on how they embrace the good and the bad. In a successful marriage, two people, who are different by virtue of being people, find the common ground on which they relate to each other, and use that as a foundation. They grow toward each other by learning about and respecting their differences, and then stay together by willingly meeting each other’s needs, whether they fully understand them or not. That last part, that really hard part—that’s love.

That love is what my interfaith marriage is all about. Rachel would call that the manifestation of God’s love and grace in our marriage. I call it my profound privilege to be able to spend every day of the rest of my life growing a little bit closer to my wife.

Based on the enduring lack of conclusive, objectively verifiable, purely empirical evidence, agnostics claim to simply not know whether or not there’s a God. As a rational response to the question of God, it’s an unassailable stance. All emotions, intuition, and inspiration aside—all subjective affirmations aside, that is—the unadorned fact remains that we don’t know whether or not there’s a God. Struggle though so many do to muddle the two categories of knowledge, belief remains distinctly different than fact.

So, since agnosticism is easily the most logical position to take relative to the question of God, why are there so few agnostics in the world? I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think of themselves as highly rational and logical.

And yet … nary an agnostic to be found!

What gives?

The reason agnosticism fails to attract people is because its core truth is in direct contradiction to the actual experience of life. Agnosticism and reality go together like wax fruit and a hearty appetite.

Agnosticism is all about doubt, about being uncertain what ultimately rules or determines life. But the things that actually do rule and determine life couldn’t be more certain or clear. Like death, for instance. Talk about a firm, clear reality. Death is as definite as it gets. As is being sick. As is being pregnant. As is being born in the first place.

Family. Stress. Joy. Taxes. Hunger. Getting evicted. Falling in love. Losing your job. Getting cut off on the freeway. Tripping on the sidewalk. A dog attacking your ankles. All of our lives are utterly dominated by conclusive, objectively verifiable, purely empirical facts and truths.

Life consists of a lot of very real stuff. Real stuff brings up real questions. And real questions need real answers.

“I don’t know” is not an answer anyone can use. You can’t do anything with it. It’s like bringing a ping-pong paddle to play golf with. No good.

The core of agnosticism is ambiguity. Life, on the other hand, is anything but ambiguous.

Bad match.

*****

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By way of researching a book of mine (I’m OK – You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers and Why We Should Stop), I posted a notice on Craigslist sites all over the country asking non-Christians to send me any short, personal statement they would like Christians to read.

“Specifically,” I wrote, “I’d like to hear how you feel about being on the receiving end of the efforts of Christian evangelicals to convert you.” (To that I added, “I want to be very clear that this is not a Christian-bashing book; it’s coming from a place that only means well for everyone. Thanks.”)

Within three days, I had in my inbox over 300 emails from non-Christians across the country. Reading them was one of the more depressing experiences of my life. I had expected it to be a message of anger, but if you boiled down to one the overall sentiment most often expressed in the nonbelievers’ statements, it would be this: Why do Christians hate us so much?

Below is a pretty random sample of the statements non-Christians sent me (each of which I used in I’m OK). If you’re a Christian, they make for a mighty saddening read. Or they certainly should, anyway.

“The main thing that baffles and angers me about Christians is how they can understand so little about human nature that when, in their fervor to convert another person, they tell that person (as they inevitably do, in one way or another), ‘You’re bad, and wrong, and evil,’ they actually expect that person to agree with them. It pretty much guarantees that virtually the only people Christians can ever realistically hope to convert are those with tragically low self-esteem.”– E.S., Denver

“I feel that Christians have got it all wrong; it seems to me that they’ve created the very thing Jesus was against: Separatism.”– T. O., Denver

“I am often distressed at the way some Christians take as a given that Christians and Christianity define goodness. Many of we non-Christians make a practice of doing good; we, too, have a well-developed ethical system, and are devoted to making the world a better place. Christians hardly have a monopoly on what’s right, or good, or just.”– C.R., Seattle

“Christians seem to have lost their focus on Jesus’ core message: ‘Love the Lord your god with all your heart and with all your soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.’”– R.M., Tacoma

“I have no problem whatsoever with God or Jesus – only Christians. It’s been my experience that most Christians are belligerent, disdainful and pushy.” — D.B., Atlanta

“Whenever I’m approached by an evangelist – by a Christian missionary – I know I’m up against someone so obsessed and narrowly focused that it will do me absolutely no good to try and explain or share my own value system. I never want to be rude to them, of course, but never have any idea how to respond to their attempts to convert me; in short order, I inevitably find myself simply feeling embarrassed–first for them, and then for us both. I’m always grateful when such encounters conclude.”– K.C., Fresno

“I don’t know whether or not most of the Christians I come across think they’re acting and being like Jesus was – but if they do, they need to go back to their Bibles, and take a closer look at Jesus.” — L.B., Phoenix

“I grew up Jewish in a Southern Baptist town, where I was constantly being told that I killed Christ, ate Christian babies, and was going to hell. So I learned early that many Christians have – or sure seem to have – no love in their hearts at all. It also seems so odd to me that Christians think that if I don’t accept their message my ears and heart are closed, because it seems to me like they have excessively closed ears and hearts to anyone else’s spiritual message and experience. They seem to have no sense of the many ways in which God reaches out to everyone. As far as I’ve ever known, Christians are narrow in their sense of God, fairly fascistic in their thinking, and extremely egotistical in thinking God only approves of them.”– B.P., Houston

“I wish Christians would resist their aggressive impulses to morph others into Christians. Didn’t Jesus preach that we should all love one another?”– M.G., Shoreline, WA

“I’m frequently approached by Christians of many denominations who ask whether I’ve accepted Christ as my savior. When I have the patience, I politely tell them that I’m Jewish. This only makes them more aggressive; they then treat me like some poor lost waif in need of their particular brand of salvation. They almost act like salespeople working on commission: If they can save my soul, then they’re one rung closer to heaven. It’s demeaning. I always remain polite, but encounters like these only show disrespect and sometimes outright intolerance for my beliefs and my culture. In Judaism, we do not seek to convert people. That is because we accept that there are many paths to God, and believe that no one religion can lay sole claim to the truth or to God’s favor. Each person is free to find his or her own way. To Christians I would say: Practice your religion as you wish. There is no need to try and influence others. If your religion is a true one, people will come to it on their own.”– M.S., Honolulu

“When did it become that being a Christian meant being an intolerant, hateful bigot? I grew up learning the positive message of Christ: Do well and treat others with respect, and your reward will be in heaven. Somehow, for a seemingly large group of Christians, that notion has gone lost: It has turned into the thunders and lights of the wrath of God, and into condemning everyone who disagrees with them to burning in the flames of hell. Somehow, present-day Christians forgot about turning the other cheek, abandoned the notion of treating others like they would like to be treated themselves; they’ve become bent on preaching, judging, and selfishly attempting to save the souls of others by condemning them. What happen to love? To tolerance? To respect?” — S.P., Nashville

“There are about a million things I’d like to say to Christians, but here’s the first few that come to mind: Please respect my right to be the person I’ve chosen to become. Worship, pray and praise your God all you want–but please leave me, and my laws, and my city, and my school alone. Stop trying to make me, or my children, worship your god. Why do we all have to be Christians? Respect my beliefs; I guarantee they’re every bit as strong as yours. Mostly, please respect my free will. Let me choose if I want to marry someone of my own sex. Let me choose if I want to have an abortion or not. Let me choose to go to hell if that’s where you believe I’m going. I can honestly say that I’d rather go to hell than live the hypocritical life I see so many Christians living.”– D.B., Seattle

“I had a friend who was, as they say, reborn. During my breaks from college she invited me to her church, and I did go a couple of times. In a matter of a month, at least ten people at her church told me that I was going to hell. The ironic thing is that I do believe in God; I’ve just never found a church where I felt at ease. However, in their eyes, I was nothing but a sinner who needed to be saved. I stopped going to that church (which in the past four years has grown from a small to a mega-church), but in time, through my friend, have seen some of these people again. None of them ever fails to treat me exactly as they did four years ago. All I can say is this: Constantly telling someone they’re going to hell is not a good way to convert them.”– A.S., Chicago

“I am a former ‘born again’ Christian. It’s been my personal experience that Christians treat the poor poorly–much like the Pharisees did in the parable of the old woman with the two coins. I found the church to be political to a fault, and its individual members all too happy to judge and look down on others. As a Christian, my own fervor to witness was beyond healthy. My friends would come to me to vent and express emotions, and all I would do is preach to them. I was of no real comfort to them. I never tried to see anything from their perspective.”– J.S.W, Philadelphia

“Once Christians know I’m gay, the conversion talk usually stops. Instead, I become this sympathetic character who apparently isn’t worthy of the gift of Christ. From my childhood in a Baptist church, I recall the ‘loathe the sin, love the sinner’ talk, but as an adult I can’t say I’ve often found Christians practicing that attitude. Deep down, I’m always relieved to avoid disturbing “conversion” conversations with Christians; discussing one’s most intimate thoughts and personal beliefs isn’t something I enjoy doing with random strangers. But at the same time, I feel as though Christians make a value judgment about my soul on the spot, simply because I am gay. I don’t pretend to know the worth of a soul, nor the coming gifts to those who convert the masses, but I would guess converting the sinful homosexuals would merit a few brownie points. But I get the feeling that most Christians don’t think we’re worth the hassle.”– R.M., Houston

“Religion always seemed too personal for me to take advice about it from people I don’t know.”– D.P., Denver

(Relative to my recent, “The Cross That Batman Bears.”)

I would no sooner suggest that an atheist can’t be moral than I would that a bug can’t be creepy a wino can’t be ambitious Batman can’t suffer jock itch any other stupid thing I might say. Of course atheists can live according to an ethos anyone would recognize as moral.

But that they can raises an interesting question. Namely; from whence the atheist’s morality? If you’re religious, you (tend to) think that your morality is an extension of God’s nature; that in endeavoring to be more like God, you assume and evince as much of His nature as you can, and thereby behave and feel more moral. So in that very real sense, the primary source of your morality is outside of yourself.

But what about the atheist? He looks up to the heavens, and sees nothing more (and nothing less!) than atmospheric science.

As the source of their morality, most atheists point toward The Common Good. They are motivated to be moral because they want to do what’s best for others. “Cause the least harm” is their inspiration; they join with the Christian (and everyone else in the world) in wanting to treat others as they themselves want to be treated.

Excellent!

What’s interesting is to think of where and/or how the atheists’ nexus of morality is, or becomes, abstract. Pointing to The Good the atheist points to nothing real, nothing tangible. He points to an idea. What inspires the atheist to be moral — to put the needs of others ahead of his own — is the power of an abstract ideal.

The atheist believes in the truth, power, and compelling goodness of an abstract ideal.

But we Christians are idiots.

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When I very suddenly became a Christian, I was in a supply closet at my job. By the time I was coming out of that closet (har! okay, grow up) — and I mean the exact thought that very strongly came to me as I was turning the doorknob that would lead me back out into the real world — I knew that I was never going to evangelize to others.

Can you imagine? You fall on your knees; out of nowhere you become a Christian; dazed, you get back up onto your feet; you reach for a doorknob; and the one thought that blasts through your head and physically arrests you for a moment is, “I’m not evangelizing. That’s not part of what this is.”

I’m not saying that thought came from God. Without question it felt like it did, but I understand that the mind is one of the trickier organs. (And, yes, I’ve aware of the argument that perhaps my tricky mind duped me into becoming a Christian.) I do know that the conviction that at that moment nailed me about evangelizing seems as true to me now as it did then. Before I was a Christian I felt like it was unbelievably offensive for one person to tell another what they should believe about God; fourteen years later, I still think that. Looking to the Bible to make sure I was right about that, I became so convinced I was that I wrote I’m OK–You’re Not.

I’m still listening to God; I’m always open to anything God might say to me about how to more perfectly understand him. And, believe me, if God ever tells me to grab a soapbox, go down by the bus station, and start screaming at people about being saved, I’ll be there just the second after I pull over to buy a bullhorn.

It’s weird though, isn’t it? About the third thought I had after becoming a Christian was, “Oh, no. Now I have to be one of those people I hate who are always telling others why they, too, should become Christian. Oh. Wait. No, I don’t have to do that. Thank God!” And then the first thing of any substance that I write after becoming a Christian is “Penguins,” in which I make a case for the argument that becoming Christian doesn’t necessarily mean becoming an irrational zombie.

“Penguins” is an apologetic. It’s an argument for Christianity, intended for non-Christians.

It’s a work of evangelism.

That God. He is tricky.

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While sitting at Starbucks yesterday I’m pretty sure I overheard the following exchange between two men whom I’ll call Chris and Stan:

Stan: But that just doesn’t make any sense.

Chris: What doesn’t?

Stan: That if I don’t believe in the reality of the same God that you just told me loves me, then that God will condemn me to hell for all eternity. It’s not possible for him to love me and do that to me.

Chris: Yes, it is. God loves you enough to let you determine your own fate.

Stan: But at the end, if he wanted to, God could change the fate that, in my ignorance, I’ve chosen for myself. If God really wanted me to be okay after I die, he could choose to send me to heaven instead of hell. He could commute the sentence I brought upon myself. He has that power, right? Because he’s all-powerful?

Chris: God can do anything.

Stan: Which can only mean that my ending up in hell is due entirely to God’s will. Ultimately God wanted that to happen to me, so it did. God actively chose hell for me. He could have put me somewhere else, but he chose not to.

Chris: You chose hell for yourself by refusing to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.

Stan: That I made that mistake doesn’t alter the fact that God has chosen to punish me for that mistake by forcing me to spend eternity being physically tortured. And anyone who would choose for me to suffer horribly throughout eternity as punishment for nothing more egregious than having used the mind and soul he gave me to arrive at a conclusion that doesn’t hurt one single person on earth, but only displeases him, cannot possible love me. Under no definition of the word does that qualify as love.

Chris: It’s divine justice.

Stan: Really? That’s justice? I’ve got the little tiny span of my lifetime to try to figure out a whole bunch of stuff about God and man, and, with the extremely limited range of information available to me in the course of that time, I decide incorrectly—I guess there’s not a God, or I decide that I just can’t be sure either way, or I choose to believe in a different God than the one prescribed for me by Christianity—and, as punishment for that mistake, God decides to condemn me to spend the rest of forever having the living flesh seared off my bones. And you’re comfortable with that as a definition of the word “justice.” That doesn’t strike you as … oh, I don’t know … excessively punitive? Like the kind of unbelievably cruel thing you might expect from a petty, egomaniacal despot, rather than a God of love?

Chris: It’s God’s judgment upon the sinner who refuses to accept God’s love.

Stan: We can talk forever about what it is. But there’s no question whatsoever about what it’s not, which is love. Look: After I’m dead, God either has the power to send me to heaven instead of hell, or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t have that power, then he’s too weak to matter. If he does have the power to send me to heaven instead of hell, and he wills me to go to hell, then he’s without compassion–or at the very least he certainly doesn’t love me. But those are the only two choices. By your own definition, your god is either not all-powerful, or not all-loving. But he can’t be all-powerful and all loving if I—a nice guy, a loving guy, a guy who gives to charities and actually does help people in the world—can end up in hell. It just doesn’t make sense. I can’t love somebody and shoot them in the head because they refuse to answer my phone calls.

Chris: You’re looking for rational explanations for mysteries that only God comprehends.

Stan: That’s so typical. Whenever Christians run into a simple logical inconsistency that cuts directly to the viability of their entire belief system, they resort to the only “argument” left to them, which is that we inferior sinners, who are so pathetic that we think it’s a good idea to use our rational minds to help us understand things that don’t seem to make sense, can’t possibly begin to grasp how and why God works in the “mysterious” ways he does. At the slightest challenge, you absolutely abandon logic. It’s ridiculous—and at best should be embarrassing to you. If you can’t explain the simplest, most obvious, most terrible contradiction in the qualities you say your God possesses–much less in the primary quality you say he possesses, which is his love for all mankind–then how in the world do you expect anyone but a sheer moron to take you or your religion seriously?

Chris: God bless you, man. I fear for your soul.

Stan: Bypassing all the repelling, presumptive arrogance inherent in that statement, I’ll share with you this one thing: I fear for your mind.

Generally speaking, atheists have championed what we Christians too readily surrender: the sacredness of thought that’s uncompromisingly rational and unapologetically independent.

Too often we believers commit the sin of intellectual indolence. The Bible is difficult to decipher—so we accept as (so to speak) gospel whatever our pastor tells us it says. A logically unassailable theology is difficult to reason through—so we substitute the clamorous fervor of emotion for the quiet discipline of studied comprehension. Understanding the evolution of our theology takes dedicated time and effort—so we rapturously focus on the future we can’t study rather than study the history we might.

Bringing to bear upon his speculations the full host of his powers, the rationalist is galvanized by a truth that Christians are long overdue embracing as divine: that it’s at the moment that you think you know everything that you know nothing.”

It’s certainly no challenge for a rationalist/atheist to dismiss out of hand those who believe in God.

The Christian, scoffs the rationalist, is weak-willed: superstitious, deaf to logic, incapable of independent thought, intellectually and even morally lazy.

Okay. We believers can take that sort of criticism. We can (or certainly should) even acknowledge the ways in which we too often facilitate non-believers reaching such conclusions about us.

But, to be fair, rationalists and atheists should consider the validity of the believer’s way. A clear context in which to understand the whole of one’s  life, as opposed to just that realm of it apprehensible to the rational mind, is a beautiful thing.

The logical mind can do and cover a lot—but not all. Before love, for instance, it can only surrender in baffled awe.

The bottom line is that when the white knight of the rational mind reaches the dense forest of human emotion, it must pull its horse up short, turn around, and trot back home. It has no business inside that forest; a few trees in renders it lost and helpless.

Whatever his shortcomings might be, the believer possesses one thing the non-believer lacks: a clear, dependable context by which to understand, process, and experience all of his emotions. That’s not nothing.

On the other hand: Christians: Don’t Too Readily Dismiss Atheists/Rationalists.

In response to the recent post of mine entitled Christian Marrying a Non-Christian? Marriage: FAIL, an atheist friend of mine, David B., wrote the following:

I’m a bona fide marriage expert. Not because I have some fancy Ivy League degree hanging on my wall, nor because I’m a published marriage counselor—no, I’m a marriage expert because I’ve been married twice. I’m a big believer in the school of you-don’t-know-it-until-you’ve-done-it. Having done it twice, I now know it twice as well. Hence, marriage expert.

My first marriage was to a lovely woman of like-spirituality. We were both humanists (which is a fancy term for do-gooder atheists) of Jewish descent. That marriage failed when she realized that she didn’t love me. ME! How could she not love me? You probably don’t know me, but I am very lovable. I know this, because my second wife, an even more lovely Christian woman named Rachel, told me so. Rachel also told me that our marriage is a resounding success, and I believe her. We both have no doubt that we will be together until we die, at which point we will be separated. According to her, I will go to hell and she will go to heaven—or, in my version, we will be dead. Either way, we won’t be together anymore, and that’s sad.

But how can this marriage really be a success? Rachel is a Christian and I am a heretical Jewish humanist. How can we fully be together when we don’t share the same spirituality? How can we unleash the full potential of our marriage if we have a spiritual chasm between us? How can we possibly understand each other when we approach life so differently? What will we teach the children? For Pete’s sake, think of the children! (If anyone knows Pete, or why he cares about the children, please let me know in the comments—oh, and tell him I want back my copy of ABBA Gold.)

As tempting as it was to ignore the problem of our differences and hope it went away, Rachel and I talked about it, and decided that since we valued our marriage too much to leave it to chance, we would be proactive about addressing our differences: we’d do it the hard way. What is it about Jews and Christians that they need to suffer to feel alive? Wait a minute, maybe we aren’t so different after all! No, that’s not it. We’re different. Might as well face it. We’re really, really different.

Women and men are different. Christians and people of other faiths are different. Christians of different denominations are different. Republicans and Democrats are different. Bostonians and San Diegans are different. Mice and men are different. Even Milli and Vanilli are different—in fact, they aren’t even themselves.

I am not a woman who was born in San Jose, CA, grew up on a farm in upstate New York, matured in Washington, has six siblings, and is passionate about her family and her faith. I never will be that woman, and while I can understand her, empathize with her, feel pretty in her clothes, and love her deeply, I will never really know the depths of her experiences or the convictions of her beliefs. No one will, except God (if you’re into that sort of thing). I don’t want to be her Savior, I want to be her husband. I want to spend every day getting closer to her and knowing her more, faith and all.

Everyone has faith of some kind, even atheists (we can’t prove there is no God, we simply believe there is no God). By recognizing your own faith, even if it’s belief in mammon—or as Washington Irving called it: “The Almighty Dollar”—you can understand how essential faith is to the core of our being. Everyone has the ability to relate to the fervent wholeness of faith, and to understand how it can permeate every aspect of one’s life. You don’t have to share the same faith to know how your spouse feels about their spiritual connection. It’s the universal feelings that come from faith, even if the faiths are different, that are the foundation from which you can connect, share, learn, and grow. Your marriage won’t fail over differences; there will always be differences. It will fail if you are not honest with each other, and lack respect for one another—spiritually or otherwise.

Marriage is a partnership. Each partner brings the best and the worst parts of themselves to their marriage, and the success or failure of their union depends on how they embrace the good and the bad. In a successful marriage, two people, who are different by virtue of being people, find the common ground on which they relate to each other, and use that as a foundation. They grow toward each other by learning about and respecting their differences, and then stay together by willingly meeting each other’s needs, whether they fully understand them or not. That last part, that really hard part—that’s love.

That love is what my interfaith marriage is all about. Rachel would call that the manifestation of God’s love and grace in our marriage. I call it my profound privilege to be able to spend every day of the rest of my life growing a little bit closer to my wife.

“God is Love.”

Great! It’s the richest philosophical/religious proposition possible.

What it means to us Christians, though, is that (what with our being made in God’s image, and all) we, too, are supposed to be All Love All the Time.

Not so great. Instant fail.

Because who can be about love all the time? Life is hard—and when it’s hard, it’s either frightening or angering, either of which tends to cancel out love like a famished shark cancels out Charlie the Thermometer Tuna. People behave like animals. They doink you just because it’s the easiest thing for them to do. Your boss wouldn’t know a good idea from a python around his neck. Your coworkers seem to think “cooperate” means “shirk and blame.” Driving home from work at night is like being stuck playing “Let’s Make a Squeal!” Lying morons trash the economy. Nonsense wars are started by men and women who wouldn’t know a battlefield from a tennis court.

Point being: bad stuff happens all the time. And when it happens to us, the immediacy of that emotional impact is less likely to leave us filled with love than it is filled with thoughts that make Satan giggle and snort.

Not so good. Common, but not so good.

And things critical to the human experience that aren’t good need to be made better. That’s the Rule of Life.

So we need to figure out the nature of all that stands between us and our conscious, daily experiencing of God’s direct, unqualified love. If we can grasp What’s Hindering Us, then we can squeeze the life out of it.

Cool. We can do that. Understanding something just means thinking about it until you do. We can think. God didn’t give us brains just so our heads wouldn’t sag in. We’re supposed to use our Giant Brains to enhance our understanding of Him. (Atheists! You can do this, too! It doesn’t have to be the Christian God you’re trying to more richly and consistently experience. It can be … The Goodness of the Universe! You can try to buff up your Cosmic Integration! Graduate to the next level of Karmic Fulfillment! Become more harmonious! Whatever you call it, or however you conceive of it, you, just like we Christians, have no choice—you’re actually morally obliged—to try and become the best person you can vis-a-vis that particular version of The Big Picture to which you subscribe.)

God (or The Force, or whatever you might happen to call it) is always fully present in our heart and mind. But too often something or other interferes with our fully apprehending that most glorious truth of all.

I think it’s time we got busy thinking about what some of that Enemy of Us stuff is—of what exactly that troublesome “something or other” is made: how it works, where it comes from, how it can be made to go back to where it came from.

And chalking up all Bad Things to Satan doesn’t get it, by the way. Blaming Satan for what you can fix is like blaming Ronald McDonald for your high cholesterol. Ronald McDonald doesn’t control what you eat. He’s just a front man, a shrill shill of a pill filled with ill will. (Sorry. Bad timing on the rhyming.) Satan can point you toward what works against you—but he can’t make you partake of it. That’s where you have to kick in.

Anyway, I’d like to start writing on the relationship between Us and that which stands between Us and God.

I’d like to actually write a book on that. And I’d like to do it right here, everyday, one post at a time.

Then, when it’s done, I could make the whole thing available on Amazon as an e-book for about seven bucks.

I like it! Using your blog to serially write a book!

Shades of Mr. Dickens!

Except it wouldn’t work, since it would so quickly leave behind those who haven’t beeen reading the posts all along.

Shoot.

Well. We’ll see.