Missed It By That Much!

Even though I frequently express impatience and frustration with obstinate religious believers, I do not consider most believers to be stupid. In fact, many of the believers I know are intelligent people. The North Carolina pastor who wrote the newsletter below, appears to be one such Christian. As you read it, you’ll probably agree with much of his reasoning and the general lesson that he took from the experience he describes. Unfortunately, he doesn’t apply that lesson to the area of his life where he most needs to do so: his religious beliefs.

During the weekend that I was away for my last class I had the wonderful opportunity to have lunch at the Whistle Stop Café, in Juliette, GA. That is right, the real Whistle Stop Café, where they served up daily batches of fried green tomatoes in the Movie named after that same southern dish. It was a surreal experience to sit at the very counter that I saw on the big screen, to eat where those wonderfully believable characters ate. I felt like I had stepped back into time, into a real history. Sitting there, eating a sandwich of Bennett’s Barbeque and sipping on sweet tea from a Mason jar, I was content with the way things seemed, the way things were presented.

My sense of connection with any real history was shattered, of course, when I talked with a local peddler of movie memorabilia who explained to me that the Whistle Stop Café was never really a café! Originally it was a grocery store. It later became a small hardware store before it fell into disrepair and became an abandoned building for over a decade or so. In fact, the whole town had become abandoned and overrun with kudzu, before the film industry entered the scene. A place of fabrication, not history, had captivated my senses.

Sometimes we believe the lie because it sounds better than reality. Ask yourself today, what do you believe about yourself, your church, your nation, or your family? Is what you believe the way things really are, or mere fabrication? Sometimes we want to believe something is as sweet as cotton candy so desperately that we ignore all of the facts that stand within clear sight. The truth about our past can hurt. The truth about our national history can be troubling and grim. The truth about our church’s past decisions, deeds, and beliefs could cause us to gasp. Then again, the truth shall set you free.

If we are looking for real connections, we will never find them by believing in fabrications. As painful as truth can be, however, it is the only path to something real—a real experience. Real experiences may not always be as nice and neat as façade experiences, but they always lead to deeper meaning and deeper life. It may hurt, for example, to discover that your church tradition once preached the importance and validity of slavery. However, such knowledge could inspire you to make new connections and deep reconciliation and friendship with African American congregations like Olive Branch Missionary Baptist Church, a daughter church of First Baptist.

Only when we see the sins of our Fathers & Mothers, past congregations, and even our former selves, can we ever hope to be free and faithful people. As easy as it may be to believe in a sinless past, such belief only leads to never-ending cycles of mistakes and repressed pain.

It baffles me how this pastor could have written, “Sometimes we believe the lie because it sounds better than reality…Sometimes we want to believe something is as sweet as cotton candy so desperately that we ignore all of the facts that stand within clear sight,” and not realized how that insight applies to his (and others’) religious beliefs. Has he never considered the possibility that beliefs in heaven, eternal life, reincarnation and the like are all products of wishful thinking?

Or, consider this: If we are looking for real connections, we will never find them by believing in fabrications. As painful as truth can be, however, it is the only path to something real—a real experience. Real experiences may not always be as nice and neat as façade experiences, but they always lead to deeper meaning and deeper life. All of the accumulated evidence of human experience, evidence that has been gained primarily through hard work and, occasionally, sheer dumb luck, points to the idea that this life on earth is the only real experience people will ever have. Squandering this life in the hope of gaining something better in a vague future is wasteful. Squandering this life in pursuit of a relationship with an imaginary being is, in addition to being wasteful, pathetically tragic. People who squander their lives in these ways miss out entirely on the deepest meanings of life, which they have the glorious freedom to determine for themselves. Many miss enjoying rich life experiences and vibrant relationships because their religions prohibit such experiences and relationships. People who have their eyes set on heaven may neglect to treasure every moment of this life for its own worth. Contrary to what many who seek a better life than this one believe, there are no do-overs in either heaven or earth; this life is all we will ever get. Since we only get one chance to do this thing called “life,” we owe it to ourselves and to each other to do the best we can with it. These are real, perhaps painful (to him), truths that this pastor does not grasp.

This pastor said many of the right words. He stated some significant ideas that comport precisely with what humanists have been trying to tell theists for eons. Yet, he failed to realize that the religious doctrine to which he clings is the kind of wishful thinking he eloquently denounced in his missive. He came very close to getting it right. But, he missed it by that much.

– the chaplain