Author Archive

Why Religion Is Better Than Science

Sunday, October 29th, 2006

Actually, most of them aren’t. But a number of religions do at least one thing better than any science I’ve ever seen: They motivate their followers to go out of their way to show kindness to people not related to them. People they’ve never met: total strangers.

That is not to say that the sciences urge cruelty. Those who study biology, chemistry and physics are no more likely than those who live by faith to deliberately harm strangers. Indeed, they are far less likely to do so than a religious fanatic is to harm an infidel. A ‘biology fanatic’ may devote his days to observing killer whales, but doing so does not make him a murderer. Indeed, naturalists have been the first and most consistent protectors of non-human life. And anthropologists often perform the same function for endangered tribes of people, urging the rest of us to appreciate rather than destroy.

Still, ‘helping’ is not the primary motivation for an anthropologist the way it is for, say, a nun who devotes her life to feeding, educating and clothing the poor. Religions can inspire us to look for God or the Buddha or Krishna or Jesus or a Hebrew Scripture Angel in a deeply flawed, smelly human being, and some people claim they really do see God or the Buddha, etc., in the eyes of that suffering person. And they spend time with that stranger, and look into his or her eyes, and get to know him or her, and emerge from the encounter having made both that person and themselves and, by extension, the rest of us, a little happier. That’s glorious.

People who are not religious at all do this too, of course. Many atheists I know care deeply for people unrelated to them, and do their best to help. We do not need religions to teach us to be ethical.

What I’m saying is neither that people need religions to remind them to show compassion, nor that the study of science removes such compassion (although there’s some evidence that the study of economics has this effect — a study of undergraduate economics students revealed them to be, on average, less altruistic at the course’s end than they’d been at the beginning). Only that some religions are really good at motivating it — at nagging people to look more closely at the stranger, to see the stranger as less strange.

And in this respect, when it does this one very important thing, religion is better, in that moment, than science.

To this, some people would add the hope many religions offer for a better life after this one — reuniting with loved ones, etc. To me, though, that hope is counterbalanced by the fear many of those same religions implant — the fear that you and/or your loved ones will end up in Hell, or at least with much more pain than you already have. I’d much rather believe that my deceased loved ones never regained consciousness than imagine them in Hell, and I feel the same way about my own fate. So I think that one’s a wash.

Roger Responds

Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

Roger Berkowitz writes, in regard to what I wrote on April 23rd:

“In response to your post: In all frankness, you mangle my point.

“My point is not that there is no difference between science and religion. Nor do I claim, as you suggest, that the science boosters are racist. You try to make me into a spokesman for some kind of cultural relativism, which I would never speak for.

“I have no complaint with the claim that science has won the day over religion. The evidence for this is too plain to be contested. Religion has failed (the Judeo-Christian God is dead). And science has indeed offered us unparalleled success, from reaching the moon to communicating through wires and beams of light. I accept the victory of science.

“Before one can criticize my claim, the decent thing to do is at least attempt to understand it. As you faithfully report, I suggested that science shares the character of religion. Now, by this I certainly don’t mean that science says, as you write:

“’Here is what I know to be true, because someone I never met wrote it in a book more than a thousand years ago. And by the way, it’s impossible for anyone to test these claims, ever. Still, if you don’t accept my interpretation of this ancient book, I will expect you to burn in Hell, and may even have to persecute and possibly kill you to make sure you get there soon.’”

“Of course, on this understanding, science shares little with religion. Then again, I don’t imagine that many religious people throughout history understand religion this way either. Indeed, aside from zealots and fanatics (of whom there are too many in and out of religions), I don’t know who would hold such a view. I don’t mean to defend religion, but to say that your definition of religion is perverse.

“So what do I mean when I say that science shares the character of religion? Well, as you know I live part time in the Hudson Valley, not far from the Hudson River. I go out sometimes and walk along the Hudson. I may contemplate the river, and what do I see? I see a waterway for ships and commerce. I see a source of power for turbines. I see a reservoir for drinking water and a reserve of (slightly irradient) fish for eating. I see a coolant for power plants and a storage tank for PCBs. The river, in other words, is a thing that is useful. Like the forest under the US Forest Service (A Land of Many Uses), the Hudson is, in its essence, something that is useful for man and society.

“Now, I may also see the river as something beautiful, a tourist attraction that is essential for the economy of my neighbors. It is even possible that I will see it as an example of nature that needs to be protected and preserved from the degrading impact of human hands. But even when I approach the river as something to be protected in itself, I understand that the river is subject to human will and manipulation. The choice to “preserve” the river in its natural state is, for us, a choice. Whether we use the river for commerce or protect it as a natural thing, the river is inescapably something that I and my fellow man can control.

“Recognizing this, I may look at the river and recognize that there is one way I cannot see the river. I have lost the ability to experience the river as awesome, as a work of nature that is beyond my control. I cannot see the river as something incomprehensible—as something that is bigger than human understanding. Even if I don’t understand its currents and chemistry, I know that I could with effort and study. The very possibility of a mighty river, a magisterial experiene of nature, is foreclosed to me.

“The scientific way of thinking about the river, in other words, stands deeply opposed to the religious worldview in which the river is just there, impervious to our understanding and will. Because I approach the river today from a scientific worldview, I can no longer experience the river as awesome or holy—holiness is, from the perspective of science, a superstition. This scientific worldview means that I believe that the river, like all things, has reasons for why it flows and why it is. The river, just as much as my computer, is comprehensible. It can be explained, understood, and thus harnessed for human ends.

“Now, this worldview is, as a worldview, something I cannot go behind. I can’t just decide to suspend my scientific mind and see the river as holy and awesome. Rather, my scientific worldview precludes any and every other way of thinking. In this sense, it is a belief that I have, one that I can’t question (except scientifically, from within a scientific critique). The point is, therefore, that science is, at bottom, a belief.

“In my book, The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, I explore one danger of the scientific worldview. I show that when law comes under the sway of scientific thinking, law necessarily loses its connection to justice. Just as the river must have reasons for how and why it flows that make it understandable, so does law—as an object of scientific thinking—need reasons that justify and explain it. But then law becomes something that is useful, something that serves some end. Today, of course, the idea that law serves ends (be they ends of fairness, efficiency, or security) is common sense. But insofar as law serves political ends—ends of our choosing—law becomes simply a tool, a means. Law, like the river, is useful.

“The scientific idea of law as a mere means stands against an understanding of law as an imperative to do justice. It denies the very existence of law as justice and insists that law, like all things in a scientific world, is only meaningful for some human goal or end. It is in this way that science, in the name of improving and bettering our understanding and use of law, chases justice from the world. Justice, like the river qua river, is an affront to the scientific faith in the rationality and human masterability of our world.

“I admit that science is useful. Science is deeply and powerfully effective way of seeing the world. I would never contest that. If I am sick, I prefer medicine to prayer (although I am skeptical of much medical knowledge). And on an airplane, I prefer to remind myself of the law of physics over and against a hope that I can fly. But your claim is bigger than that: you argue that ‘the world, if studied, may be rationally understood.’ You write:

‘By now, moreover, it should be obvious that the assumption that the world, if studied, may be rationally understood, has in fact been demonstrated. If it had not, people would never have reached the moon, to cite an obvious example; nor would we have conquered polio, nor have invented the computers on which words like this are written and read.’

“Your point is that science is not only effective, but also true: you argue that we have mastered the world or are in the process of mastering it through science. In other words, the effectivity of science is proof of its truth.

“Against you, my point is that science is a worldview that we accept and cannot prove. Indeed any attempt to prove the scientific world of reason is caught within our own need to prove it according to the very same scientific standards we are attempting to question. We can’t escape the scientific world since it is our worldview. It has great benefits, but an appreciation of its advantages ought not to blind us to thinking honestly about its deficiencies. As a faith in the rationality and knowability of the world, science cannot abide or allow the thought of that which exceeds or escapes its grasp. The world becomes demystified and rational, and we lose our ability to think and act meaningfully upon a thought of the holiness or justice of a world beyond our control. You may not see this as a loss. But that it is a fact of our belief in science is, I think, undeniable.”

I appreciate your response, Roger, and apologize to you for mangling your point. I have a better understanding now of what you actually meant – or think I do. If we’d had more time to talk at the party, I imagine I would have understood it better still.

Perhaps one reason for my apparent obtuseness is that I simply don’t see the need to make the choice you say we’ve been compelled to make – the choice between science and holiness, or, as I prefer to call it, reverence.

I love what the scientific view has been able to tell us about the world. Yet I have not lost the “ability to think and act meaningfully upon a thought of the holiness or justice of a world beyond our control,” as you say one must, if one accepts the gifts of science. I still believe in the holiness and justice of a world beyond my control, and can still see people in mystical terms, even as I happily acknowledge that most of us evolved from ape-like mammals. (I say ‘most of us,’ because some do   to have evolved.)

I guess I don’t see the loss.

Moreover, I have a hard time understanding why it is even worthwhile to insist that scientific beliefs are ‘beliefs, therefore they share some of the character of religious beliefs.’

At that level of abstraction, of course, everything is a belief. But why dwell on that fact? What is the use?

I don’t see what it gets one, to emphasize the fact that everything that we know or think we know is a belief. Of course it’s true – but so what? All beliefs are not equal, and calling scientific truths ‘beliefs’ as a way to point up human ignorance seems silly.

Perhaps I misunderstand again. I have to ask, though: What do we gain by reminding ourselves that scientific beliefs are only beliefs? Does not every scientist and appreciator of science already know that, and accept that all findings are provisional?

Every belief is ‘only a belief.’ But some beliefs are better than others.

What am I missing?

A Brief Pitch for Marrow Donation

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

If you don’t currently know anyone who needs a bone-marrow donation to live, you may soon. Some 35,000 American children and adults need these stem cells of the blood in order to keep going, and many find that their relatives and close friends do not match them closely enough to prevent their bodies from rejecting the gift. Hence, they rely on strangers.

In today’s Science Times, Jane Brody notes that marrow donation has become much less painful, which is a big improvement. (It used to require large needles and hip pain somewhat greater that that which would result from a hard fall on the ice.)

Still, only six million American volunteers have signed up for the national marrow registry. On the one hand, that’s amazing — six million people have signed up to help people they don’t even know a little. This generosity goes beyond the capability of most animals, and is, according to spiritual teachers like the Buddha, Moses Maimonides and Jesus, the highest form of charity.

On the other hand, the population of the United States is just shy of 300 million, so some of you haven’t quite gotten around to signing up.

If you haven’t, please do so. It’s easy. Contact the National Marrow Donor Program, and they’ll help you out.

Most of us never get the chance to save the life of a stranger, whether dramatically or un-. Marrow donation offers you that chance. Imagine the feeling you would carry with you, if you knew that you had helped a child to live!

Why Science Is Better Than Religion

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

It has long been fashionable for smart people from liberal arts backgrounds (like my own) to equate science and religion. Such people are fond of saying things like, “Science is a religion, too,” “Science and religion are equally valid; they’re just two different ways of looking at the world,” and “Scientists don’t like to admit that they are, in their own way, just as irrational as religious people.” This attitude seems to come from a well-meaning resistance to the idea that some ways of looking at the world might have more value than others – an idea which may seem, though it is not, to be close to the idea that some races of people are better than others.
This line of thinking is hogwash. And it’s on my mind because tonight — at a lovely going-away party in Brooklyn Heights held by, and for, Mischa Frusztajer — a very smart person for whom I have tremendous respect made such a statement. (I won’t identify him, except to say that he is a very good guy and has read many more books than I have, including some in German, and that his name is Roger Berkowitz, and that he has written a very smart book called The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition.”) Roger said something to the effect of ‘Science and religion are essentially the same, because both start from unprovable assumptions. Scientists start from the assumption that the world may be rationally understood. That is an assumption, as Leibniz pointed out, that must be made; there is no ‘proving’ such a thing.”

Here is what I would have said, if I’d had a few more of my wits about me: “Actually, there is an enormous difference between saying, ‘Here is what I understand about the world, and if you follow these steps, you can test my statement for yourself, and see if I’m right,’ and saying, ‘Here is what I know to be true, because someone I never met wrote it in a book more than a thousand years ago. And by the way, it’s impossible for anyone to test these claims, ever. Still, if you don’t accept my interpretation of this ancient book, I will expect you to burn in Hell, and may even have to persecute and possibly kill you to make sure you get there soon.”

Science and religion are not the same. Science is a self-correcting method of learning about the world. Good scientists make no claims that cannot be tested by others. The same cannot be said of good clergy.

Even if one grants that both scientists and the religious begin with at least one untested assumption — the scientists, that the world may be comprehended; the religious, that God or a god or gods and/or goddesses communicated His or Her or Their desires to some people a long time ago, and expected the rest of us to believe and follow those people’s written accounts — look at what happens after those initial assumptions. Scientists test something, measure the results, continue to test it from various angles, and invite others to join them in those tests, to see what else may be learned. (By now, moreover, it should be obvious that the assumption that the world, if studied, may be rationally understood, has in fact been demonstrated. If it had not, people would never have reached the moon, to cite an obvious example; nor would we have conquered polio, nor have invented the computers on which words like this are written and read.)

The religious, on the other hand, do not test their writings over and over, nor do they invite others to do such testing. Instead of testing they insist, often violently, on the primacy of their particular writings over competing versions.

I can’t believe I have to explain this, but here goes: Insisting is not the same as testing. Insisting requires persuasion and power — sometimes the full weight of the state. Testing requires honesty and precision.
Imagine that your car breaks down in a strange town, and two men approach you to offer their help. One of them offers to study your car, and test various possibilities until he finds the source of the problem. The other insists that God has told his ancestors why cars break down, and that you’d better believe him, or your car will never run again. To which man will you listen?

If you’re smart, you’ll listen to the one who’s willing to actually study the car and test a number of possibilities. If you’re not as smart, you’ll listen to the one who sounds most confident or scares you the most, regardless of what he may know about cars.
And that, my friends, is why science is better than religion: It’s smarter, it’s humbler, and it doesn’t need to enforce its conclusions with a sword.

A Memory of Reading

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

A recent piece in the British press described a conversation among writers about their idea of the perfect evening. I think it was Christopher Hitchens who said that his involved being alone in a warm room, in a comfortable chair, with a new book by the (very) late P.G. Wodehouse.

That probably wasn’t what the questioner had in mind. The obvious answers for most men would involve a great meal and some company, whether of good friends or a beautiful woman or two.

Maybe that’s why the answer stands out for me. It’s not one I would not have thought to make. And yet some of my happiest memories involve reading alone.

One such came up on Wednesday’s warm evening, as I sat with my girlfriend Amy Farranto and our friend Win Clevenger on the rooftop of Bar 13 after the lovely book party Nomi Prins hosted for Anthony Arnove’s “Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal”. Win mentioned the Rod Stewart song “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, and my neurons immediately took me back to a scene that probably took place on December 31st, 1979.

I was sitting on the green couch in our house on 1017 Highland Park Road in Schenectady, New York. “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” was playing on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year. Following it closely was Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.” I was eleven and a half years old.

My mom and dad were getting dressed up to go out. My dad smelled of cologne, my mom of perfume. When I told her how pretty she looked, she seemed embarrassed, but pleased. A babysitter would be coming soon to watch us; we weren’t old enough to join the adults for their fun.
I was reading a science-fiction story called “Apple,” part of an anthology I had gotten from the library called “Zoo 2000.” The story was set in the future, after an atomic war had wiped out millions and caused a number of strange mutations. In this particular town, radiation had made an apple grow until it loomed over the town like a mountain. The men of the town made their living by mining its flesh. The story’s protagonist, an exterminator, had just arrived at the town’s request. He had been called in because a giant moth was killing the miners – wrapping them in a gauzy web. The atmosphere of the story was fantastic, as he walked through the appley tunnels and approached the rotting area where the moth made her home.

Either song – the “Sexy” song or the Heart of Glass – can take me right back into that story. Their cool detachment and their synthesizers lend them a science-fiction feel.

I’m sure none of the artists involved in those songs could imagine an 11-year-old boy in upstate New York associating their songs with a story about an enormous apple and a murderous moth. Similarly, the author of that story could not have imagined it being called to mind more than 20 years later – well after the year 2000 – by the mention of a song by Rod Stewart.

But that’s how their works live in my brain.

I’d love to hear your own happy, or just intense, reading memories. Send them to bilbo68 (at) earthlink.net .

Picking on Psychics

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

I like almost everything the NYT’s Dan Barry writes. He’s got a real way with words, and a feeling for the people he writes about. Except today.

In today’s column(Times Select; sub. req.) he writes about a psychic named Yolana, an older woman who once made a pretty good living predicting the future and now faces an uncertain retirement. To ‘balance’ the column, Barry talks with the managing editor of The Skeptical Inquirer, who asks, “Why don’t Yolana, John Edward, Sylvia Browne — why don’t all the psychics — summon their powers and find Osama bin Laden?”

The question seems reasonable. And this is what respectable newspapers do: They use reason to make fun of psychics. This reassures their readers, who feel smarter for being in on the joke.
But on April 1st, just 11 days earlier, Barry wrote about two other older women who face an uncertain retirement: nuns whose church was being closed as part of a broader ‘realignment.’ (Times Select; sub. req.)

This time, Barry didn’t interview the managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer about the faith of those nuns. If he had, after all, that managing editor might have asked, “What good is the faith of those nuns, if it can’t save their church from closing? And while we’re at it, why can’t the Pope find Osama bin Laden?”

May you forget your first book

Monday, April 10th, 2006

I love the Literacy Site, and all the sites associated with it. Simply by clicking on the button in the middle of the page, and those of its sister sites (which are tabbed at the top: The Hunger Site, the Breast Cancer Site, the Rainforest site, the Child Health site, and the Animal Rescue site), broadband users can
* provide a cup of food to a hungry person,
* help fund a mammogram,
* preserve 11.4 square feet of endangered rainforest,
* help fund basic health care for kids,
* help provide reading material to kids, and
* help animals in distress,

all in less than a minute, from the comfort of their own chairs. The Hunger Site launched during the dot-com boom, and busted when everything else did. But now it’s back, along with the peers described above, and it’s simply the most ingenious use of advertising dollars I know.

It’s great. But today, when I got to the Literacy Site, I cringed. Appropriating the old ‘You always remember your first _____’ motif (kiss, lover, car, etc.), someone at the Literacy Site wrote, “You always remember your first book.”

Actually, if parents are doing their jobs, their kids should have no idea what their first book was. They should have encountered it when they were too young to form serial memories, and it should have been followed by countless others, so that the first one faded into the dim past. Of course, that’s not how it always is for kids – but it’s how it ought to be.
So please remember to click on the Literacy Site each day, to ensure that kids get enough books, early enough, so they have no chance of remembering them.

Love Beats Fear

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Originally published by The Guy Code on January 25, 2001.

The nuns at Catholic school were kind enough to teach us a number of things we could do, and a few things we had to do, to avoid going to Hell.

Receiving the sacraments – holy communion, confirmation and so on – helped. But it was mandatory to go to mass each Sunday and each Holy Day of Obligation – i.e., the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary on Dec. 8, the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven on Aug. 15, Christmas and a few others. The sisters taught us that missing even one of these services without a really good excuse put a black mark on our souls that would outweigh any good deeds we might have done.

Unless we went to confession and received a priest’s absolution for missing a particular mass, the stain of that sin would pull us straight down to Hell when we died. There we would be tortured for all eternity, even as we retained the awareness that we would never see our saved loved ones, or our loving Creator, again.

Because touching a woman below the belt counts as a mortal sin unless she’s your wife, we had to confess each of those acts, too. I sometimes wonder if certain sins were declared “mortal” simply to make confession more interesting.

Reinforcing authority

In any event, it was certainly no coincidence that the moral teachings of the Church focused on activities that reinforced the Church’s authority. You had to go to mass, on average, more than once a week; had to confess mortal sins to an accredited priest; had to receive the sacraments, including that of marriage, within the Church’s walls; and so on – all to avoid burning eternally. In addition, you could earn a bonus by doing extra church-related activity – going to Mass on the first Friday of each month for nine consecutive months, for example, or attending special sessions of the rosary.

What strikes me about all this, now, is how little any of it has to do with love. Yet, according to Jesus, upon whose words and deeds the Church was purportedly built, the greatest commandment is to love God, and the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. (He never listed a ‘third-most-important commandment.’)

Nowhere in Jesus’ words will you find a commandment to attend mass, or even to pray in public. Nowhere does Jesus command his followers to tell a priest each time they touch a woman, or themselves, below the belt. Nowhere does he list the sacraments that have come to seem so necessary – all requiring the assistance of a priest. Nowhere does he speak of the importance of the Pope, or of wearing elaborate vestments or of building elaborate churches or of making chalices of sculpted gold.

Moreover, while the nuns used a lot of words to tell us about the love our God felt for us, it was hard for some of us to feel the “love” of a God who was ready to roast us forever just because we didn’t feel like going to a particular mass. Rather than love, the God they described was worthy of our terror.

No nunsence

I don’t blame the nuns, by the way. One of my aunts was a nun, and many of the nuns I’ve known were and are kind individuals. They taught me a great deal that was valuable. I’m focusing on the harsher aspects of the system into which most of them had been born. It was all they knew, and they had sworn to uphold it. They cared enough about us to want to keep us out of Hell, and that’s a kindness. From their perspective, instilling a fear of Hell was even more important than teaching us to be wary of cars.

Eventually the fear and authority of the Church stopped making sense to me, and I began to move away from it all, looking over my shoulder every so often as I went. Since leaving the Church I’ve made some progress, I think, in learning to love my neighbor. I haven’t learned as much about how to love God, in part I think because the original model I received was so frightening that I often prefer not to think about Him at all. I just have to hope that the nuns don’t turn out to be right. Time will tell.

One thing I’ve learned outside the Church’s embrace is that the priorities Jesus actually listed – be kind to others, visit the sick, forgive those who have hurt you – is the wisdom that is central to most other religions, too.

In our era, empirical evidence has come along to support that wisdom. As it turns out, many of the people who have had near-death experiences come back in full agreement with those values. Over and over, they talk about the importance of love.

That’s nice, isn’t it?

I’ve spoken with five or six people who have had near-death experiences, and have read thousands of accounts. I have yet to find a single one that mentions the Pope. I’m still looking for a reference to missing mass, or sensual touching, or mortal sin of any form. If I find one, I’ll let you know.

God wants love, not fear

Meanwhile, I’m relieved to see the happy evidence pile up. One hellfire-and-brimstone preacher who had such an experience actually went back to the pulpit and apologized for misleading his flock. “God wants us to love,” he told them, “not to fear.”

Again and again, such people talk of the importance of not harming others or yourself – and, while avoiding such harm, learning to love.

These lessons first went public in Dr. Raymond Moody’s “Life After Life.” Subsequent research by psychology professor Kenneth Ring, Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino and others has reinforced Moody’s findings, as you can read in “Lessons From the Light: What We Can Learn From the Near-Death Experience,” among many other reputable sources.

The evidence indicates that when people die, the questions of how well they had loved, and how much they had learned, matter far more than the name of their religion.

So maybe we ought to work on those things, instead of scaring each other.

The Un-Godfather

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Originally published by The Guy Code on October 16, 2000. Story’s doing great; she just turned five. I saw her just a few weeks ago. She’s a gem.

Hey, congratulate me – I’m a godfather! You can think of this column as me buying you a cigar. If I could see you, I’d ask you to shake my hand. Then I’d blabber to you, in a disjointed, excited way, about an infant you don’t know and I haven’t seen.

If you were polite and had a minute, you’d hang in there, pretending to listen, and try to find some way that any of this relates to you.

Best of luck. I’ll try to help, of course. I want to be polite, too.

My friends Diane and Rick had a baby on Monday, October 9. A little blond-haired girl, seven pounds and change. What do you think of that? Pretty good, huh?

Sure, I know – babies are born every day. They all look the same to you, and the ones who know them all insist this one’s different.

Really, what’s different is how the ones who know the baby now think of themselves. Older people who had been feeling tired, out of touch with the times, on the way out, can now see themselves instead as grandparents, aunts and uncles. People with a job to do for the baby – people who now have a stake in the future. It revitalizes them. They can’t stop smiling, and talking about the source of their joy is a way for them to keep the good feeling going.

That’s how I feel. I’d love it if you’d let me dwell on it for a moment.

Diane and Rick named their baby Story Frances. Nice name, don’t you think? Diane has a master’s in English literature, and as a journalist, she’s forever chasing stories. Now there’s a Story she’ll never stop telling.

Rick’s been looking forward to the birth in his own way. A week ago, he showed me the pager he was carrying. “When I get the call,” he said, “if I’m at work, I’m going to tell my co-workers, ‘Hey – I have to run. My old friend’s coming to visit.’”

As it turned out, he was at home when his wife’s contractions began to increase; there was no need to page.

Rick’s a big fan of the Beatles. It pleased him to learn that John Lennon was born exactly 60 years before Story was.

But enough about them. Let’s talk about me. I’m the godfather, after all. Yeah, just like Marlon Brando. (Yeah, that’s a good impression you’re doing right now. Very nice – thanks for the effort on that.)

Well, it’s a tricky situation, really, because of the religious leanings of Story’s parents.

Who put the God in Godfather?

See, usually it’s Catholic families that request godparents. A godparent’s job is to nurture the child’s faith, particularly in the event that anything happens to the parents. At the infant’s baptism, the godparents answer the priest’s questions on behalf of the baby. The questions are fairly straightforward, such as, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works?” (The correct answer is “You betcha, Padre.”)

Thing is, Diane and Rick were never Catholic. Diane grew up as a Latter-Day Saint. Rick was raised as a Jew. Neither religion embraces the concept of “godfather.”

But it goes further than that. I doubt it would shock their relatives to learn that neither Diane nor Rick is particularly, um, observant. Technically, they’re atheists – although Diane has shown some recent interest in astrology. So you might want to call me the ungodfather. Or the godlessfather.

That works for me. I grew up Catholic, so I have experience with godparents, but I’m not sure I’d qualify anymore to be a godfather under those guidelines. Priests encourage Catholic couples to choose godparents who accept the authority of the Pope; they’re sticklers that way.

So, as the formerly Catholic godfather of the offspring of an unbelieving Mormon and a nonpracticing Jew, what’s my role?

Glad you asked. I was afraid I’d lost you for a minute.

I’m not sure, myself. But I have a pretty good idea of what I might do.

In a memoir called “Between Heaven and Earth,” the Jungian therapist Robert Johnson recalls the influences of various ‘unofficial godparents’ in his life. For Johnson, a godparent is one who guides a child’s inner life. Parents order the external life – when to go to sleep, go to school, do chores, and so on. While they’re busy with that, a godparent can talk to the child about the deeper questions.

That sounds pretty good to me.

But wish me luck.

What I Got, When I Gave Up Homphobia

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Originally published by The Guy Code on September 18, 2000.

I’ve been thinking about this issue of homophobia, lately, from a purely selfish point of view. I haven’t been trying to defend political correctness, or to change society by instituting liberal policies. I just found myself wondering how my own life might have been different, if I had kept it closed to gays and lesbians.

I used to keep it solidly closed. I called people “faggot” for years, even after I knew what it meant. (As a young boy, I’d thought it meant only “a bundle of sticks” – a mistake that left me very confused when, after I used it to describe a fellow student, a teacher kicked me into a wall. Later that day, my mom told me that the word meant more than I had thought. I kept using it – we all did – but I was more careful after that.)

As a freshman in high school, I inspired a friend of mine to help me tease an effeminate classmate. We bullied him, scared him, made fun of the way he said the letter ‘s.’ The whole nine yards. We did not regret it, afterward; we laughed about it. That we had tormented someone together made us closer friends. Probably we felt safer as friends, now that we had warded off the demon of homosexuality. Maybe that’s why soldiers and male athletes tend to show more homophobia than others: Doing so enables them to become closer.

In some ways it would have been natural for me to continue behaving that way. The Catholic schools I attended were not hotbeds of tolerance. Nuns and monks taught us that homosexuality was a grave sin. Who was I to say I knew better? And if God hated gays, then maybe I was doing them a favor by teasing them – maybe my nastiness would show them the error of their ways, and they would come back to the straight side before it was too late. I don’t mean to exaggerate my hostility; I was never in a situation that approached the brutality with which Matthew Shepherd and others were treated. But I certainly was not very nice.

(By the way, that idea – saving someone by hurting them – is not as absurd as it may sound to someone who has not grown up under a religious cloud. If you are taught that no punishment meted out by humans could ever approach the tortures of the damned, then it can feel like an act of kindness to try to scare the hell out of people by using tactics that an atheist would consider cruel.)

In addition to the religious worries, I had to worry about pleasing my parents. My father worried that a friend of mine who had an earring and long hair might be queer. The fact that he wasn’t – the fact that the pretty girls in our class liked him more than they liked me – did not undo the lesson that a queer friend was not the right kind to have.

Get over it!

At some point I got over it. By and by, the evidence accumulated that what I had been taught was just so much bullshit. And now, here are some obvious and tangible ways that my life today would be different if I had believed the B.S.:

* I would be paying a lot more rent and living in a crappy apartment. My broker, who is gay, appreciates my friendship, as I appreciate his. When a better apartment than the one I had first rented from him became available, he let me know about it before a single ad had run. Had we not been friends, I would never have known that such an apartment existed as the one that is now my home.

* I would never have had a chocolate martini, or seen the original “Dracula,” with musical accompaniment by Philip Glass.

* One of my oldest friends would not have told me the truth about himself. As a result, our friendship would have undoubtedly deteriorated in a way that would have confused me; I would never have learned why he was no longer comfortable with me. I would probably have said ‘Oh, well, friendships die, c’est la vie’ – or the equivalent to ‘c’est la vie’ in a language that sounds more masculine than French. ‘Asi es la vida,’ probably.

* I would never have become friends with a woman I know whose parents both left each other for same-sex lovers when she was a child. Again, I would not have known why we were not friends; it just would have seemed to work out that way.

* A very good friend of mine would not have been there for me a few years back, as a listening ear and an erudite sounding board, as I went through a time that was emotionally very painful. His compassionate guidance showed me that there might be meaning in my suffering; without his guidance, the trip would have been much lonelier.

* I would not have gotten such good advice about avoiding law school, as a lesbian friend of mine gave me during a frank discussion about how to figure out what you really want in life and why.

* I would have missed out on hours of laughter. One example that jumps to mind is watching the John Waters movie “Polyester” at a party thrown by a gay friend. Again, I would never have known that the party existed, had we not become friends.

* I would never have known a man named Francisco, who died of AIDS some years back as I visited him each week over a period of months. Knowing him deepened my life in ways that are hard now to measure; concretely, knowing him meant that my brother and I could stay with his family, in a small town in Mexico, years after his death; we saw life there better than we could have done as tourists.

* I would not have felt the admiration for Bill Clinton that I felt during the 1992 campaign. When a young woman asked him about gays in the military, he said, “We need all Americans, working together.” My admiration for that strong statement stands, no matter how disappointed I was by his lies during the Lewinsky investigation.

* I would have missed out on knowing what it was like to have a man hit on me at a gay bar.

Why would that be a loss? Here’s why: I have hit on a number of women, and I will probably hit on many more before I’m done. I have tended to see this experience from my perspective only, so that the awkwardness of my target’s response has often felt personal.

To get hit on by a strong man in whom you have no interest is not the same as being hit on by a woman. The difference in physical strength increases one’s need to remain polite while trying to convince him to let you be. I suddenly appreciated, in a new way, the gyrations some women have gone through in order to reject me without causing me to lose face.

I also saw that it was often not personal: My rejection of this man had nothing to do with his face, or his approach, or his level of physical fitness, or his soul, or his clothes. It was simply that he wasn’t my type, because my type is female.

* I would have missed out on simple, cordial relations with nurses and patients in the psych hospital where I once worked and at the magazine where I now work. There are many people in our lives whose smile is important to us even though we will never become close friends. The ability to comfortably greet someone, in the course of your day, without having to feel anxiety about that person’s “lifestyle choice,” should not be minimized.

* I would have missed out on a funny, external affirmation of my heterosexuality. Not long after meeting me, one friend said, “I could tell you were straight because you were so comfortable with me. If you were, on the fence, shall we say, my presence would probably have made you agitated.”

In short, the increasing comfort I have felt with gays and lesbians has improved and deepened my life in a way that is no longer possible even to measure. I cannot imagine how my life would look now without these friendships. It would certainly be narrower, and would certainly be lonelier.

Fewer of my friends would be my friends – and this extends to straight friends, too, because most people in my social circle find homophobia, like racism, rather off-putting.

As well they should.

A few years ago, I tracked down the boy I had tormented as a high-school freshman. I called him at his home in Montana, where he lives as an artist. We talked for a little while, and I told him how sorry I was for what my friend and I had done to him. I wrote him a letter afterward, underlining what I had said awkwardly on the phone. He sent me a postcard, saying that he appreciated my efforts to make things better. It was also clear that he remembered my cruelty quite well; I was unable to comfort myself by telling myself that it had been no big deal.

It had been a big deal, and I’m only glad I didn’t create too many others before I knew better.