On Prayer (for beginners and unbelievers)

Christians pray; atheists (at least those not in foxholes) don’t. How come?

For an atheist why have a one-way conversation with someone or something that doesn’t exist, and because he or it doesn’t exist can’t answer your prayers? A person would first have to fool themselves into believing in prayer then have to fool themselves into accepting the whatever that happens is God’s answer. One could save a lot of time not praying. After all, as many Christians must admit, atheists are often good loving human beings (if not sometimes more so) than committed believers. Where’s the advantage?

Despite what you heard on the street or learned from your friends in back alleys (or were told by your parents and Sunday school teachers) Christian prayer is not turning in requisitions and accepting deliveries. Prayer can mean a lot more than supplication. As for types of prayer there’s everything from Anne Lamott’s famous three, Help, Thanks, Wow, to a list expanding up to 650 from a Google query. 

Lists often get them in the wrong order, putting “ask” first, while adoration and thanksgiving vie for second and third. That might be how many believers would rank them but they’d be wrong. Most elements of prayer have been adapted, I speculate, from protocols of approaching tribal kings for favors: “Kneel, worms [mixed metaphors], before the great and mysterious Oz!” [Better butter up the ol’ dude before it’s off with your heads.]

First, admitting the socioeconomic gap between the parties (adoration)—Infinite, Eternal Creator of All Things compared to mortal creature who owes everything he is, was, and will be to said Creator—is a great place to start, defining who you are and where you’re coming from. Granted you’ll never worship Him enough but something is better than nothing just to let Him know you understand the situation. And a little humbling never hurt anyone. 

[After ladling on the praise, not to waste the Big Guy’s time, get on with the matter at hand (petitioning):]

Creator:“What brings you to God today?”

creature: “Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?”

C: “Why not buy one yourself?” 

c: “Minimum-wage job, can’t save enough. Have to eat, pay rent, doctor bills, cable, Starbucks—You know the drill.”

C: “You realize how much you’d save cutting out gourmet coffee and putting up with an occasional disease or two? Hey, weren’t you here last week confessing an unwarranted desire for a BMW7-series sedan?”

[Doesn’t look like this prayer is going to get answered favorably, so it might be best to leave now.]

c: “Well I was in the neighborhood and since I hadn’t revered You in a while I thought to put in a word in case You changed Your Mind.“

C: Who were you singing about in the line, “. . . but naught changeth Thee” . . . chopped liver?”

c: “OK. I accept Your Will but before I go I sincerely want to thank you from the bottom of my heart (thanksgiving) that You gave me a part of Your busy schedule. And thanks again for creating me and sustaining me even as a carless pedestrian. I am grateful I have feet and can get about pretty easily if I make the effort. It’s not like I’m a worm slithering in the dirt—not that there’s anything wrong with being a worm. See Ya!”

There’s a lot of wonderful things that can be said about prayer, but perhaps not by me at this time. At least I tried to clarify why Christians have that extra requirement (burden, opportunity) which atheists ignore—prayer, talking to God. Or as an atheist said to me regularly as I left for church on Sundays, “Say hello to your Imaginary Friend for me.” I did, though she probably really didn’t want me to.

Biggest Daily News Never Told

"If it bleeds, it leads," a truism of newspaper journalism is not entirely faulty guidance but one can imagine instances where even grisly murders might eventually play second fiddle to "dog bites man" features should the readership become so inured to major crime they come to regard it as just a part of daily life. Somewhat farfetched I grant, until the day without the murder is newsworthy.

Who would be fascinated if the same story ran--headlines, graphics, and photos--day after day despite such a magical record and despite the overwhelming significance of its occurrence morning after morning? Opening the news with anything less would betray the highest ideals of news coverage.

"NUCLEAR NATIONS AVOIDED WORLD'S DESTRUCTION ANOTHER DAY

"Somehow the most powerful, aggressive, and arrogant leaders of the nuclear gangs managed once again to not attack each other through missteps, failing computer chips, radars tracking flocks of geese, lightning strikes, and damn people just pushing the wrong buttons for another twenty four hours. 

"Had we been able to tell you this yesterday you could have slept easier, gone fishing with your children, built your spouse the potting shed you've been promising all these years, or read at least one of the shorter texts in your holy scriptures without subconscious distraction.

"No, we did't tell you. We couldn't be sure. Stranger things happen regularly. But parlaying chances in a thicket of sociopathic heads of state and complex systems lacking sufficient redundancies to guarantee you a single second of continued existence is beyond our pay grade."

Sooner or later, once the immensity of the message wears off or people become numb from thinking on their fragile mortality, the story (still immense, still very much there) falls below the fold, gets pushed to the second page, finally to the spot above the crosswords among the comics, and then to . . .nothing. That's where we are today.

One might easily attribute it to some conspiracy theory--a cabal of military, industrial, secret government agencies working behind the scenes to ensure they receive adequate cover and funds to expand and  renew weapons of mass destruction without so much as a single plebiscite from us for support. Or, maybe it's just our collective unconscious jamming fears of horrendous catastrophes back into our mental basements, behind the stack of baby buggies, broken toys, and half-used paint cans. Could be, editors are not so different from us plebes; they have fears and one of them is pissing off their readers.

As we hinted earlier the day may come when the biggest news will happen. But that day no one will be printing much less reading the news.

Choice and Duty

Several days before the Wehrmacht invaded Poland Hermann Goebbels, Germany's minister of propaganda, made sure rumors of Polish military activity abounded, going so far as to stage a false flag assault of German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms on a radio station near the border, thereby rendering the September 1 invasion a "retaliation" for the unprovoked Polish attack.

We've seen that kind of thing before (Quemoy, Matsu). It is a distinct mark of war's beginning that the aggressors claim a violation shortly before they open fire. In today's wars it may be even harder to determine just who shot first. If you're in a submarine, underwater, and totally dependent on coded official communiques you can't easily turn on Moscow TV and check if any story is true, or for that matter, Al Jazeera, Dutch cable news, or UK's BBC.

So you're sitting in front of your missile control screen checking to see that your Tootsie is armed, targeted, and cleared to launch, just waiting for your turn to Pass Go and collect $200, when a novel thought crackles through your cortex: "Is this real? Or just a pretext for us radically-conditioned, subconsciously loyal lackeys to take the bait and bring the world to an end?"

For a real first strike perhaps they'd say your country's been attacked. There's that. But if so, the deterrent has failed and the enemy has set off to kill as many of you as they can. You could attack them in turn, but why? Your missiles wouldn't be deterring anything. Plenty of people are already going to die.

Your missiles would only increase those numbers, possibly ending all life on earth. Now that's a sin of an entirely different sort than just choosing heinously and callously to vaporize, melt, blind, crush, separate into segments, blow away the parts, and irradiate what's left of millions to wither in nauseous agony in one fell swoop. Allowing the enemy to live to procreate and possibly evolve to a peaceful sort has lots of merit in the overall scheme--gentlemanly, if not positively Christian, or ethical if you're not into religion.

If, however, your action was a first strike, you'd also have to consider whether you'd risk your families' evisceration in the ensuing guaranteed counterattack or whether that was just so much malarkey and that the world would be much better off without those feather-brains constantly rattling their hydrogen-sabres.

On the other hand, if your firing was instead the real assurance that destruction would be mutual, review the guidance above about whether increasing the death tolls would be worth it, since you could stay underwater in that well-stocked submarine, travel the world in search of an unirradiated isle where you might thrive a while, and watch satellite TV as to whether the world was really going to make it.

Lastly, you may have to determine whether becoming a submarine missileer was what you really wanted to do with your life, because the MP with the 45 at your temple is likely not to wait very long for your answer to his, "What's the holdup, Mister/Ms?" Unless you and your colleagues are prepared at that point to tell Captain Bligh the ship is no longer his, you may have to conclude risking your death then and there is preferable to ensuring the deaths of hundreds of thousands elsewhere in ten to twenty minutes.

Now this would be a great time to kick back, grab a Bud, and make a lot of chin music about the complexities of conscience. True, it would have been better to think about these things before you ever swore to defend the constitution in uniform. But, alas and alack, whenever do these problems come up at the right time?

Halifax Harbor, Beirut, Nuclear Weapons

Antinuclear demonstration, Hiroshima/Nagasaki remembrance,
75th anniversary, Olympia Washington August 6th, 2020

Momma said, "Don't keep tons of ammonium nitrate sitting in a big heap near where people live, 'cause someday that shit's gonna go off." But she didn't say it in Canadian or Lebanese.

Travelers to Canada's maritimes are often apprised of the events of the 6 December 1917 when a shipload of ammunition was struck by a passing vessel and exploded in Halifax harbor about 9 AM, killing 2,000 residents and injuring 9,000 more. The explosion was thought equivalent to 2.9 kilotons of TNT and was at the time the world's largest manmade explosion to date. It flattened much of the Richmond district of Halifax and precipitated international relief efforts to medicate the many wounded. It was, one for the history books. Nonetheless I knew nothing of it prior to my visit in the year 2000.

But Halifax was the first thing on my mind on learning of the disastrous explosion in the port of Beirut the evening of August fourth. How could a group of modern, knowledgeable citizens, probably familiar with the chemicals of terror weapons, sit comfortably nearby 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a hot warehouse? Had they never heard of Timothy McVeigh? Maybe not, after all they were Lebanese, not Oklahomans.

Well, the damn pile didn't explode the first day, nor the second, nor for many days after until the sixth year of its storage when it finally did explode. Despite the yearly pleas of authorities who recognized the danger, the situation seemed well in hand and demanded no immediate attention.

My next thought though was about a similar situation, recognized as dangerous--imminently so--which has also failed to receive immediate attention. So far this situation hasn't yet gone critical despite its teetering on the knife edge of history for close to seventy years. I refer to the horrific destructive potential of hair-triggered nuclear weapons scattered about the nations of the world: tunneled into prairies, aloft on bombers, roaming wastelands on trucks, and undersea in submarines.

Currently we are in danger of a new arms race of nuclear weapons and delivery systems as the US, North Korea, Russia, China, India, and Pakistan have all recently rattled their nuclear sabres and let existing restrictive treaties expire left and right. Waiting in the wings are the small fry wannabes of Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia who gaze longingly at their future of nuclear threatening among the big boy gangs of the earth.

Can these Rube Goldberg contraptions of Mutually Assured Destruction stay balanced long enough to let humanity think in generational terms? Or as contraptions with an expanding diversity of wobbling intricacies isn't it the bettor's favorite that they won't--sooner than later? Eat, drink, and be merry for the next day, or the day after that, if not tomorrow of course, we shall certainly die.

And on the other hand we shall certainly kill. It won't really make that much difference if we kill in a first strike or we kill just as certainly in retaliation. Some are disturbed by the thought of dying and would like to avoid it at all costs so they make a deal with the devil and relax--as much as is possible--relying on MAD to keep their chestnuts out of the fire. But there are those of us who are equally appalled at the thought of killing people who have personally posed no threat to us, killing in massive, horrendous, tortuous ways that likely will end all life on earth.

How arrogant that course would be--to risk ending the human experiment over some matter of national pride or power! Yet we seem unpersuaded there is any other way--only the way of domination--been that way for centuries and it won't change in the foreseeable, if rather brief, future.

But no man, no nation, can have the authority to risk the world's end, or further, to wreak such suffering on the innocent whether the world ends or not. Powers who propose use of such weapons, stockpile them as reasonable deterrents to obliteration, or constantly rob their citizens of wealth to develop and assemble even more destructive varieties cannot claim they have the authority to do so. Their declared intentions label them as madmen, whether they are heads of democratic or authoritarian states, they have no authority to risk worldwide suicide.

The people of nuclear states have every right to remove such authorities and to dismantle all these instruments of terror and death universally so that humanity can finally be free of fear.