MERE STRANGER:

Interviewed by the Devil

(Draft 1.10.04 for Philosophers without Gods)

comments to: mbelzer@bgnet.bgsu.edu

*********

--Transcript—

FoxTV: The Devil Live!

11.7.03

The Devil (TD): I’d like to welcome my guest today, Zoe Alexis.

Zoe Alexis (ZA): Thank you for having me.

TD: It is nice to have you on my show tonight.

ZA: Thank you.

TD: Right. So what’s your story, Zoe?

ZA: You want me just to jump right into it without any introduction or anything?

TD: Go ahead, we haven’t got all day. We want to know why you’re in the book.

ZA: Its tempting to try to evade all of that, since it is not an easy thing to talk about. It was not a smooth process, with my own faith leading to the dissolution of my beliefs. And this affected important relationships, the closest ones. I’ve rarely ever talked about it with anybody, not even privately, much less on tv. Actually I’ve tended to hide my story rather than tell it. And when I have tried to tell it, the results have not been good. People seem to find it trivial—What’s the big deal? Why did you dwell on such details for so long?

TD: Well?

ZA: Or they get upset, they don’t like aspects of it. And personally I don’t really feel the need to talk about it, since there are so many other good things in my life now that I would prefer to focus on.

TD: Ok.

ZA: Furthermore I don’t understand everything about it, so I’m afraid I won’t do it justice.

TD: Please.

ZA: I would almost rather talk about my sex life!

TD: Great! We’ll talk about that too. Go ahead.

ZA: Shouldn’t you at least explain the context? I’m not sure going into it will make sense just out of the blue.

TD: Well, ok, then. Why don’t you begin by telling us the title of the book.

ZA: You don’t even know the title?

TD: The book’s around here somewhere, but I lost track of it in this mess. Something about philosophers not having something.

ZA: Yes.

TD: Goes with our general theme this week.

ZA: Yes.

TD: Was it Philosophers without Dogs?

ZA: There you go.

TD: Ok, then. Now that is a most unusual and intriguing topic. So what’s your story?

ZA: I don’t have a dog.

TD: Really?!

ZA: What about you? What’s your story?

TD: I take it you haven’t read my new book, The Devil May Care.

ZA: No, not yet.

TD: Well, you should read the book. Anyway, this show is all about you. So you don’t have a dog then. Can you elaborate on that?

ZA: I definitely do not have a dog.

TD: You’ve checked—

ZA: I checked this morning. I looked all over my house and there was no dog at all.

TD: You checked the closets?

ZA: Yes, no barking, nothing. Definitely no dog.

TD: Perhaps a miniature?

ZA: No.

TD: So that’s why Professor Antony wanted your story?

ZA: Yes, apparently so.

TD: Very interesting.

ZA: So that about wraps it up?

TD: And you say you don’t talk about it very much?

ZA: Not too much.

TD: Why not?

ZA: What is there to say? People who have dogs can talk about various tricks, adventures. Also there is the negative stuff, how bad dogs happen to good people, things like that. But people like me, we are not really driven to discuss it very much.

TD: No.

ZA: And as I said, when I try to talk about it people either find it trivial—

TD: Well, no, I think its really rather interesting!

ZA: Or it becomes a sensitive topic. They think I’m attacking their dog. But I’m not—I mean, so long as it doesn’t growl at me or chase the squirrels in my backyard.

TD: Did you ever have a dog?

ZA: When I was small.

TD: Well?

ZA: We had little cocker spaniel named Owens.

TD: What color?

ZA: Yellow.

TD: Hmm. So it was Owens that affected your family relationships and so forth?

ZA: Yes, sure.

TD: Was he a bad dog that happened to good people?

ZA: Oh, no, he was a great dog.

[silence]

TD: Well, we’ll come back to that then. We already have a couple of callers here. George is on the line from Kansas City. Go ahead, George.

Caller (George): Who cares about philosophers who don’t have dogs?

TD: There you go, that’s a sensible question. What about it, Zoe?

ZA: Good point, George. Why not electricians without dogs? I agree.

TD: Ok, Ethel in Boston. Go ahead, please.

Caller (Ethel): I have a beautiful Lhasa Apso. C’mon here and talk on tv, little smoochie-poochie. And I would like to know why your guest has to go around on tv attacking my little dog?

Caller (background): Arf-arf.

ZA: See?

TD: Ok. Let’s take another call.

[silence]

ZA: No calls?

TD: No, they hung up. Looks like a quiet evening.

ZA: People probably are watching something else.

TD: Frazier re-runs, I think. They’re killing us.

ZA: Yeah, those are good.

TD: So why was your dog named Owens. That’s an unusual name for a dog isn’t it?

ZA: Well.

TD: Why not something like Spot?

ZA: It didn’t have any spots.

TD: Why Owens?

ZA: When we were just getting the dog, we had a visitor in our home named Donald Owens. He was a very nice guy and it seemed like a good name.

TD: A businessman?

ZA: No.

TD: What did he do?

ZA: A missionary. To South Korea, I think. He was going to speak at our church.

TD: So your family is religious?

ZA: Yes, pretty much. I was brought up in a Christian home.

TD: So are you still—

ZA: I took it very seriously for a very long time. But then things changed.

TD: So what happened?

ZA: Gradually my very faith itself dissolved the beliefs associated with the religion.

TD: That sounds odd.

ZA: A lot remained that I value, but nothing specifically Christian so far as beliefs are concerned. I actually don’t have a single belief right now about God or rebirth, it is like a blank slate, a vacuum chamber.

TD: That sounds very odd indeed. So what type—

ZA: The Nazarenes, it’s an evangelical branch of Methodism, began in America in the early 1900s.

TD: So why did they split from the Methodists?

ZA: Some of the Methodists felt their church was getting too liberal around ideas about the “social gospel” and that it was losing the focus on John Wesley’s original doctrines of “heart holiness” and entire sanctification.

TD: But I had thought that Wesley himself was preaching a social gospel.

ZA: That is true. Wesley, who began as an Anglican minister, emphasized care of the body as much as the soul, and he regarded proper medical care for the poor as important as saving their souls. But nonetheless the first Nazarenes were focussed on his spiritual teachings and felt their fellow Methodists had gone too far with the political and social stuff. There were other groups that joined in too from other directions. The early Nazarenes generally were dismayed by developments in American culture, such as vaudeville, and so they developed strict rules against participation in such things.

TD: Like what?

ZA: No vaudeville, later no going to movies, no dancing, no alcohol or tobacco, no sex outside marriage of course, no sleeveless dresses, no mixed bathing.

TD: No mixed what?

ZA: Different sexes shouldn’t swim together. That rule was forgotten by the time I came along. Also the no sleeveless dresses. But the others were still there.

TD: Did you follow the rules?

ZA: Yes. Up until I was into my 20s.

TD: Sounds dreary.

ZA: Not really. The strict rules sometimes were a drag, like in Junior High when I wanted to go to the school dance but didn’t go, and I was wondering what I was missing. But all in all it made sense to me. It gave my mind a seclusion that was peaceful. And by the time I was in high school I didn’t care much about things I might be missing.

TD: What were you doing?

ZA: Normal things like schoolwork, babysitting my younger siblings, playing the piano. I liked to run and play basketball. And then our religious life filled up my time. We went to church three times every week, and I prayed and read the Bible every day.

TD: So you could have music?

ZA: Yes, there’s some pretty good music. For example, have you ever sung in Handel’s Messiah?

TD: No, I can’t really carry—

ZA: It doesn’t matter how well you sing

And He will pu-ur-i-fy.

And He will purify-hi-hi-hi-hi-

hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-

hi-hi-hi

The Sons

Of Levi!

That they may Of-

Fer Up to the Lord an Of-Fer-ing

Of Righteousness,

Of Ri-ghteousness!

TD: Very sweet.

ZA: Right. Thank you.

TD: But shouldn’t you be going i-i-i- instead of hi-hi-hi. That would make it smoother.

ZA: True—I always do that wrong! --See ! I can’t really sing very well either but I don’t care. Its like in Ghana they say, bad dancing does not hurt the ground. Go do it, and you’ll know a what I’m talking about.

TD: But you couldn’t actually dance?

ZA: No. Movement just was not happening with the music. In fact you can go into a Nazarene church and the music is good and everyone is singing yet they will be sitting quite still—at least that’s how it used to be.

TD: Why isn’t dancing ok?

ZA: Because it might lead to sex, I suppose.

TD: Between unmarried people.

ZA: Yes. And my brother jokes that the missionary position would have to be the only permissible sexual position, because any other position might lead to dancing.

TD: You must have been terribly repressed!

ZA: That’s a complex issue. Sublimation might be the better term here, since it can actually be good and positive.

TD: For what?

ZA: For developing a deeply concentrated mind that is calm and permeated with joy. Seclusion is a condition for it, which of course includes not being incessantly preoccupied with sex. They’ve known about this in parts of Asia for a very long time.

TD: So did you masturbate?

ZA: What?!

TD: Just asking.

ZA: No, not at all. Not until I was like 21.

TD: Whoa! That’s repression!

ZA: Call it what you will, it didn’t seem like a problem back then.

TD: What about later?

ZA: Of course it is. Do you want my therapist’s phone number?

TD: Relax, I thought you wanted—

ZA: I have had a lot of repressed sexuality due to that sort of upbringing, but all the same I am not going to simply dismiss it as bad. It’s complicated. Doesn’t almost everyone have some issues to work out about sex? And I hate to say it but your Fox network here is not helping in the least. Why does a videotape of Paris Hilton having sex with her boyfriend deserve hour after hour of coverage? That focus is not the way—

TD: Yes, I will be doing another special on the scandal next week.

ZA: See? What scandal? There is no scandal, you just want to show the clips again—

TD: Well, people are curious. And, frankly, the asexual life you describe sounds very boring.

ZA: As a matter of fact, it was not boring to me in the least. C. S. Lewis wrote a book called Surprised by Joy. But I always thought his title was weird because I was never surprised by joy. It seems joy was part of my life from the beginning, perhaps because my mother was singing to me. And I had some good experiences when I was young, similar I believe to what John Wesley describes as his own “heart warming” experiences. In any case, these experiences made a strong impression on me.

TD: You had these experiences in church?

ZA: Yes, revival meetings and old-time camp meetings. One place we’d go in the summers actually had sawdust on the ground. But our religious life wasn’t separated from home life. According to my mom, when I was 4 or 5 I taught myself to read by looking in the Bible and figuring out what it said, and by following along as it was read to me. My folks instilled confidence that this Book was important and I spent a lot of time just looking at it. My parents embodied joy and love and devotion. They are very cool people, and they still are among my best friends.—Hi, Mom!

TD: Please, this is not—

ZA: Thanks for singing!

TD: Please, this is a serious interview on national television, not some game show.

ZA: No.

TD: Was watching tv against the rules?

ZA: No, but we didn’t own a tv until I was 10 years old. It was exciting when we finally got one, but by then I had other interests and I never got into the habit of watching it.

TD: Why wasn’t tv against the rules?

ZA: Perhaps by the time it came along, the Nazarenes were already accommodating the wider culture, becoming more comfortable and mainstream. I don’t know. Television is so powerful that to ban it you’d probably have to go all the way with the Amish and proscribe electricity too.

TD: So about those so-called heart warming experiences—

ZA: They weren’t merely so-called—

TD: Ok. So what are you talking about?

ZA: As a child, it was quite natural to invite Jesus into my heart. We sang a lovely song in Sunday School.

Into my heart,

into my heart,

come into my heart, Lord Jesus,

come in today,

come in to stay,

come into my heart, Lord Jesus.

TD: Well, that’s very sweet.

ZA: Right. Thank you. So I did this sort of inviting many times as a child—it was quite natural to do it. And there were real effects of doing so. I felt happy, free. It was a letting go, a surrender to Jesus and to the whole world beyond me. I developed a warm, open, peaceful heart. I don’t really understand it, but it was good—quite wonderful. The experiences were grounded in the belief in a magnanimous and personal source of the universe.

TD: You mean God.

ZA: Right. God. It is a vast thought. And my mind as a child encompassed that thought. At least gestured in its direction in a liberating way. I definitely believed in God. It was a core belief, at the center of the web of belief, a belief in terms of which everything else was interpreted. It was abstract but grounded and personal because the experiences were interpreted as making for a connection with God. Given my situation there wasn’t any reason to doubt it. Even though the idea of God itself was not based on the senses, it wasn’t completely abstract either. It was similar to my beliefs about numbers. I comprehended the existence of God, and belief in God was as central for me as the basic truths of arithmetic, which I was good at too.

TD: Good for you.

ZA: Sorry, I didn’t mean to brag.

TD: So you prayed?

ZA: Yes, of course. I had confidence that in inviting Jesus into my heart there was within me a direct connection—

TD: You could just talk directly.

ZA: Yes. Prayer usually was expressing gratitude and requesting help and guidance.

TD: So you would ask for things like new toys.

ZA: Not really, that would have been too trivial. The connection was with the loving source of everything around me—the flowers, the squirrels, the stars. And especially other people. Our beliefs were linked to actions. My parents were kind, always showing interest in strangers. They were always helping somebody, usually people with problems, and the problems were interesting. So I was around people who were in trouble and my folks were trying to help them. Often somebody strange was sitting at the dinner table.—Who is this person?-- It was engaging and tremendously liberating for me to grow up around this.

TD: Why do you say liberating?

ZA: Because Kindness is the Freedom of the Heart, as the Buddha says—it Glows, it Shines, it Blazes forth.

TD: So your family was following the Buddha too?

ZA: Oh no, certainly not! We were following Jesus.

TD: Love God with all your Heart, and your Neighbor as Yourself.

ZA: Exactly. It is love from top to bottom. Kindness is inextricably linked with the heart-warming experiences. And trying to live with this sort of thing in mind, at the center, is liberating. It definitely makes for happiness. My own problems, our own problems as a family—things like not much money, the death of a younger brother who only lived a few months—I experienced these difficulties in a wide context due to participating in the generosity and kindness of my parents to other people outside of the family. Their kindness was the kindness of Jesus, a part of the whole package that was a source of wonder and joy and it definitely was the center of my life. And even though things changed, so that the specifically religious thoughts disappeared completely from my life, it is no wonder to me at all why generally it works well for many people.

TD: So you felt happy as a child, but later it got dreary.

ZA: No, it never got dreary for me. Instead the basic beliefs just unraveled.

TD: Well, what was—

ZA: There was this background issue that people would end up in hell if they didn’t become Christians. This became a problem for me.

TD: Being sent to hell.

ZA: Right. So the issue of hell mixed in an element of fear, even terror. I don’t recall it being on my mind very much as a child, since I was secure on the side of joy. I had the clear understanding that the Old Testament message of a wrathful and vengeful God had been superceded by Jesus’ message of love.

TD: There is no fear in Love.

ZA: Right. You know your Bible.

TD: Perfect Love casts out fear.

ZA: Right. So here’s an arithmetic problem for you. If there is no fear in love, and if one is loving God with all one’s heart—then how much room is left in one’s heart for fear?

TD: Uh, one-half?

ZA: Wrong. You need to practice your arithmetic, haha.

TD: One-third?

ZA: Look, suppose you have some ketchup that contains no mustard at all, not even a particle. And then suppose you have a room that is completely full of that ketchup from floor to ceiling, every square inch. How much of that room would contain mustard?

TD: One-fourth?

ZA: Wow, you are really bad at this. Arithmetic is not something you have to guess about.

TD: So what about hell?

ZA: So I never worried much about myself going to hell. I found it pretty easy to assume that I was ok.

TD: You were following the rules.

ZA: Right. I’d believed I’d been saved, and I had confidence I’d be ok.

TD: So what was the problem?

ZA: Well, as I said, what became a problem is other people ending up in hell due to not being saved, which is what I understood was going to happen. This was an element of the belief system that I learned and accepted. Everyone needs to be saved.

TD: Why exactly do people need to be saved?

ZA: Look, do I have to educate you about everything?

TD: Ok, forget it.

ZA: It’s because of sin. Whether you say it’s some sort of original sin or simply the negative actions flowing from anger, greed, hatred, pride and so forth, something needs to be done about it. We need to be forgiven, we need to let go of the past, forgive ourselves, and as much as possible get free—

TD: Ok.

ZA: Plus, of course, we need to avoid ending up in hell which is connected with not being forgiven.

TD: So you didn’t believe in sin?

ZA: I believed in sin. It was easy enough to believe in it just seeing my own mind and seeing other people’s problems and just seeing the world generally. But I also felt confident about being forgiven and so forth.

TD: Good for you.

ZA: Right. And so naturally I regarded it as important to tell others about all this, so they too could be saved.

TD: Did you tell them?

ZA: Not much, actually. As a teenager, I tried to do it, but honestly I was never very good at it.

TD: Why not?

ZA: You needed to know what the other person was thinking to do it right, or so I thought—but knowing what they thought required listening to them. But then I would get interested in what they were saying and lose my momentum.

TD: So you were not a good missionary.

ZA: No, I was not. But I loved it when missionaries visited the church. They invariably brought photographs and slides of people from all over the world. I was aware that there is tremendous diversity among people on this planet. Some people hardly wear clothes! It was shocking and delightful to me when I was little.

TD: But they are going to go to hell for that!

ZA: Not for that. Actually Owens made a good point about that.

TD: It was a talking dog?

ZA: The missionary. I heard him preach about this some years later, when I was older.

TD: You probably paid very close attention to him because of the dog?

ZA: That’s right!

TD: What was his point?

ZA: Owens pointed out that to be effective as a missionary, going into another culture to evangelize, one needs to distinguish between A) what is essentially Christian and genuinely necessary for salvation, and B) what is only part of our own culture and not essential for salvation. What is genuinely necessary is what you really needed to be saved and what is spurious is only part of our own limited culture. Clothing falls into the spurious category.

TD: So you can go around naked and still be a Christian?

ZA: Funny. Maybe you do have to cover up something. But Africans can become Christians without necessarily wearing white shirts to church.

TD: What about going to church? Do you really have to go to church? Or what about all those rules?

ZA: Well, all that begins to raise the deeper questions. What is really essential to avoid hell?

TD: So it was the issue of hell that led you to rebel?

ZA: I didn’t rebel, I have never rebelled. I had friends who rebelled as teenagers, but not me. Instead I took a more gradual course, and my faith eventually dissolved the beliefs. I was patient and careful. I became interested in philosophy. I liked it, and it presented itself as a way of getting clear and preparing to be able to present the Good News of the Gospel in an effective way. That is how I approached it.

TD: But why wasn’t philosophy against the rules?

ZA: For Wesleyans philosophy is ok. John Wesley was part of the European Enlightenment and not strictly speaking a fundamentalist. I never was told that the Bible is literally true. The Bible has to be interpreted, and interpretation requires thought. So they do not discourage thinking. Science is one thing, salvation another. There never was a moment, for example, when the theory of evolution presented itself as a problem for me or my Christian faith. Science is about what can be observed, it is about this world, and it really isn’t very difficult to find ways to reconcile any scientific theory with beliefs about what is beyond direct observation. In any case, the Bible is not about science, it is about salvation. And it has to be interpreted. So also for the ecstatic, heart-warming experiences—they don’t interpret themselves. So you don’t rely on them much. You enjoy and appreciate them, but when they fade, you still have faith that something good persists. The faith isn’t in the experiences themselves, of course; the faith is in God. To realize these simple points requires reflection on the experiences. You have to think about them, you have to interpret them just as you have to interpret the Bible. Without thought one easily could get stuck in a depressed state when the good feelings faded.

TD: Reflection supports the faith.

ZA: Yes, and generally things should make sense. Things should be consistent. These points were part and parcel of my own Christian orientation, they were not foreign elements.

TD: But only take thinking so far.

ZA: Right, there is always the danger of pride messing it up. Pride goes before a fall.—Uh. As I guess you would know.

TD: Very true.

ZA: You seem a bit different than I’d expected.

TD: I have been working on my image for tv. So what happened when you started thinking about the problem of evil?

ZA: I am not talking about the problem of evil.

TD: But I thought—

ZA: The problems are related, but the traditional problem of evil is a different problem, as it is formulated, for example, by Hume and Mackie. How could there be vast suffering in a world created by an all-powerful and all-good Being? That is a good question, but it seemed to me that problem can be solved, for example, along the lines that Plantinga does it in his book God, Freedom and Evil. That wasn’t the issue for me.

TD: Free will?

ZA: No. Free will is not the solution, since suffering manifests in so many ways other than through evil human choices. Besides it really is difficult to make any sense of the sort of free will that would be necessary for the free will answer to work out. So indirectly the appeal to free will is an appeal to mystery.

TD: So what is the solution?

ZA: Simply make a direct appeal to mystery. It is logically possible that God has good reasons for permitting the evils that are abundant in the world. But why should we be the first to know what those reasons are? This may seem like an evasion—actually, true, it is an evasion—but nonetheless it is a coherent reply to the charge of logical incoherence. At any rate, this reply was good enough for me back then. Our knowledge obviously is limited. Just think about what little we know about the world right around us. The more we learn the less we seem to know. For example, it is reasonable right now to believe that more than 90% of the stuff in the universe is so-called “dark matter/ dark energy”—

TD: Nice name!

ZA: Some sort of stuff, but we have no idea what it might be! It has to be inferred because we can calculate that objects in various cosmic systems are moving fast enough that they’d simply fly apart if there were only the gravitational force from the types of physical objects and energy that we already know about.

TD: Hmm.

ZA: Actually 90% is quite a large percentage, don’t you think? That would mean that our current laws are based on observations of only 10% of what is real in the physical world. And it’s not only stuff in outer space, I would assume. It’d have to be right here under our noses too.

TD: Inside our noses!

ZA: Yes, and in our central nervous system too. Makes one wonder if it really makes sense to speculate about the mind/body problem right now. We literally can have at most 10% of an idea what we are talking about!

TD: One-tenth.

ZA: Also I wonder—might it not be more reasonable to expect some revisions in the basic laws, the ones used in the calculation, rather than to expect that we’ll find 9 times more stuff than what we already know about?! But I’m digressing here.

TD: Yes.

ZA: The point was that the world is incredibly mysterious, and there is no way that our growing body of scientific knowledge is reducing the mystery. So for a person who already has faith in God, the problem of evil isn’t necessarily going to be a problem. At least it wasn’t the problem for me, even though I obviously could not explain what an all-powerful God’s reasons were for permitting suffering.

TD: So what was the real issue here, if not the problem of evil?

ZA: The idea that people would end up in hell by virtue of not being Christians. Let’s call it exclusivism. It is the idea that Christian faith is the only way to salvation, and so it is crucially important for the ultimate well-being of every human being. It is similar to the problem of evil in that it challenges the goodness and fairness or the power of God. Many people just never have a fair chance to become Christians, that is obvious. And that’s not fair.

TD: But Christians haven’t exactly ignored that problem, have they?

ZA: No, it is discussed now and then. But C. S. Lewis is a good example of somebody discussing it but not taking it seriously and so doing a poor cover-up job on it. It can make you suspicious there really is a serious underlying problem.

TD: Could you remind me what he said?

ZA: Yes. I brought a copy of Mere Christianity. This is what he says on page 65. Here is another thing that used to puzzle me. Is it not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him?

TD: That’s the problem you’re calling exclusivism?

ZA: Exactly. The new life is the Christian life both in this world and beyond. Whatever the details about sin and redemption may be, the idea of a new life sums it up. And the underlying assumption is that if you do not have this new life, you end up in hell. Now the way Lewis describes it, it would seem that he understands the problem. And so you are ready for him to go on to explain why it does not puzzle him any more.

TD: So what does he say?

ZA: But the truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

TD: He just gives up on exclusivism?

ZA: No, not so fast. He asserts explicitly that nobody can be saved except through Christ. But his answer to the puzzle here is much like Plantinga’s about evil more generally—we don’t really know what God is doing in detail. It is a mystery to us. So even if we assume Christ is essential for salvation, as he says, we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through him.

TD: But that means you might not actually have to become a Christian in this life in order to be saved.

ZA: Exactly. And as that becomes clear, everything specifically Christian has moved over to the spurious side of Owens’ chart!

TD: You mean it wasn’t genuinely necessary for salvation.

ZA: Right. It can’t be. Anyone who claims that explicit Christian faith in this life is necessary to avoid hell is going beyond what they really can know, and it flies flat in the face of the fairness of God, since many people do not have a fair chance. Even Lewis says as much. And yet if actually accepting the Christian faith isn’t necessary, then given the distinction from Owens, it is spurious.

TD: So then you stopped believing?

ZA: No, not at all. But this was the first step, because it defuses the importance of spreading the Christian Gospel based on the idea that people need it in order to avoid hell. But there actually was a deeper issue. The appeal to mystery was required to make coherent sense of the whole picture. To deal with the problem of evil and the puzzle of exclusivism, we have to focus on the limits of our knowledge about God. And so these points raised the question what do I myself really know about God? I am simply one of the beings in this world. Why should I assume that the information that has happened to come to me, given the conditions of my life, would be inherently better than the information of others?

TD: Maybe the naked Africans drumming all night have better information than you.

ZA: Right, they also are real live human beings, living in God’s world, and if God has revealed special things to us that aren’t possibly going to be shared by all and—that do not need to be shared by all—at least not in this life, as follows from the Lewis point—then so also perhaps God has done the same with them. In any case, I didn’t want to be part of something here that wasn’t by its nature shared with others. I had no interest in a private faith.

TD: But what about revelation? Isn’t that the whole point of Christianity, that God is revealed publicly in Jesus?

ZA: That is exactly the sort of thing that came clearly into question. If we don’t really know what God is doing relative to the basic issues about suffering and salvation, why be so confident in other basic beliefs?

TD: But isn’t that the point of revelation?

ZA: Well, to clarify this we can look at Lewis again, what he says about Jesus’ revealing God. This also is from Mere Christianity, and it is a good example of the problems. In this passage he is discussing the idea that Jesus is divine: A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

TD: Whoa! He actually said that?

ZA: Yes, page 56. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

TD: Wow, that’s pretty powerful stuff. He actually said that Jesus might be the Devil of Hell?

ZA: Yes.

TD: It certainly is nice to get mentioned in such a favorable light! So what would you say to Lewis?

ZA: Pretty much the same thing that he says in response to the puzzle about salvation. I don’t know. The past is irretrievably gone. There is much that no one living now can ever know about what happened concerning Jesus, especially concerning the relatively few passages in the New Testament to which Lewis is referring. For example, I don’t really know exactly what Jesus said versus what was added later by people who were excited generally by his life and teachings and who may have read things into his life story. People can and do debate these points in great detail, but it will remain speculative. I looked into those debates, but it was obvious that I was never going to know very much about what Jesus intended to do or imply. In any case, there is no reason to accept Lewis’ assumption that any reasonable person has to accept that Jesus was either a lunatic or God.

TD: Or the Devil of Hell.

ZA: A number of individual human beings have made deep impressions on many other people, as did Jesus. I really did not know what Lewis claimed to know about Jesus. And Lewis did not know it either, in my opinion, despite his claims; nor does anyone else know it either. Of course, people may have beliefs about it one way or the other, and back then I myself had the Christian beliefs. But I was seeing how speculative they are. I am not saying even now that people are irrational to have the beliefs or even to build their lives around those beliefs. But all the same, the whole issue should be recognized as speculative, and this is what I was beginning to see.

TD: So you had some doubts?

ZA: It was obvious that I would always remain basically ignorant about these details concerning the past, about what Jesus actually claimed, what he meant by his claims, and so forth. And so Lewis’ dogmatic points definitely were not helpful.

TD: So you were having a crisis and Lewis’ reasoning about revelation—

ZA: I wouldn’t call it a crisis. I was simply paying attention and being serious. The “lunatic or God or worse” argument is a bad argument, it is a false trilemma, but unfortunately it still seems to get repeated a great deal by evangelical Christians. As for me, looking at this world as best I could, then, was it clear to me that the basic claims of revelation made within Christianity are true? No, it was not at all clear. Given my own situation, I realized that my own basis for believing in the very things Lewis was defending was not much better than someone who had never even heard about it, or for whom the Gospel was not a live alternative.

TD: The people in the jungles.

ZA: Right. There still are such people, you know, who have never been in contact with outside civilizations at all.

TD: Yes, I saw something about it in National Geographic recently.

ZA: But it wasn’t only people like that living far away. The people in jungles were actually pretty abstract to me, since I’d only seen pictures. There were people right around me, the strangers my folks had always shown interest in. It seemed obvious to me that given the facts of their lives, most of them had not really had anything like a fair chance to become sincere believers.

TD: But they could if only you were a better witness!

ZA: You’re missing the point. I now was seeing it from their perspective. I was identifying with them, not merely seeing them as others whom I was supposed to help save. And I was seeing that what I had to say to them about the religion—what anybody had to say, putting the best spin on it—was not very convincing. It certainly wasn’t like lightning hitting them, and so no wonder they didn’t or couldn’t muster the faith.

TD: So that’s when you quit believing?

ZA: No. At first none of this mattered to my own beliefs very much at all. Don’t forget, the whole thing is based on faith. And I had faith. And I also was not naïve about how faith works within the Christian framework. Obviously it is not based on having some sort of demonstrative proof about the basic historical claims. My mind set was like this. The past is irretrievably gone, and many questions will simply remain unanswered. But God is alive now! And I am related to God now. This idea was central to my faith. There’s an old song we sang, goes like this

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

Melt me .. da-da

Da-da Use me..

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.

I forgot some of the words.

TD: Very sweet.

ZA: Right. Like the children’s song about inviting Jesus into my heart, this song also expresses something I took to be real. There isn’t a vast separation, on the contrary, there was a sense of immediacy in the relation with God. And this immediate and personal dynamic relationship cannot possibly be dependent on unknowable information and mere speculation about the past. The details about the historical Jesus were not all that relevant to my living relationship now with God.

TD: So you were a sort of super-Protestant concerning the relationship between yourself and God?

ZA: Ok I guess you could call it that. And then gradually it dawned on me that God must want and intend for us to think about things other than religious beliefs and practices! Otherwise God would have made it more obvious—and in a general way—what should be believed. All our beliefs about God are themselves spurious. It isn’t merely the Christian message relative to avoiding hell, and these points don’t pertain merely to those who have never heard about any of it. It pertains to me too! What I have in common with the South American Aborigines is more important—to God! -- than what makes us different. And so God couldn’t possibly want me, or any of us, to spend our lives in this amazing world focussed on the religious issues that cannot be shared by all! Life isn’t trivial; it is not a pointless game. It is a startling and mysterious situation. And while a great many people are suffering, happiness is possible! The real problems should be addressed—surely this is God’s view!-- and we should not be obsessed with any of the spurious religious stuff!

TD: Ok. You don’t need to shout.

ZA: And it was my faith that made these thoughts possible, my faith itself gave rise to these thoughts. Without the faith, I would not have been able to look into this. I would not have cared enough to look into it in the way I did. I might have remained in a sort of dull hazy state about it. Yet my faith was sort of dissolving itself. Or rather, it was dissolving a conceptual box of beliefs because the box was too small, too confining.

TD: Hmm.

ZA: But then a new wrinkle appeared. Then I actually connected for awhile with the fear of hell myself.—But wait! --What about me?-- I am not living deep in the jungles of South America. I have had a lot of privileges, including acquaintance with the Gospel. I can read Lewis and understand what he is saying. I can also read Russell and see that his own reasons for not being a Christian do not provide arguments against my being a Christian. Russell’s essay, you know, taken as a general argument against Christianity, is stupendously weak. And suppose Lewis is right; suppose the military metaphors are apt. Sending me to hell for not believing, were I not to believe, would hardly be unfair given all the positive advantages I have had, at least compared with many other people.

TD: So maybe you were going to end up in hell yourself if you stopped believing. Even if the South American Aborigines were going to get more chances later on in some future life.

ZA: Exactly. The ideas were deep in my pysche. Lewis expresses this well. Indeed in the very paragraph following the one I read earlier, where he invites us to weaken exclusivism so that people don’t really need to accept Christ in this life, he starts talking about the idea that God is going to invade the world again: Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely… God will invade…It will be too late then to choose your side.

TD: I would say that is not exactly in the spirit of the milder comments—

ZA: -- right, that we don’t really know how the mechanics of salvation works out, we don’t really have any sort of complete idea what it means to be on God’s side. Yet then he backtracks immediately into the same old all-or-nothing stance. And I certainly understand it, for the fear of being on the wrong side—the fear that Lewis is expressing and inciting—was deep in my psyche too. These sorts of thoughts were quite real to me! And so there was a period of time when it still seemed possible that I myself could be destined for hell, were I not a Christian in this life, even if everybody else would be getting another chance later.

TD: Perhaps you already had had your fair chance.

ZA: Yes, exactly. By that time, however, I was not willing to identify myself as a Christian because it seemed too trivial, it seemed false to the heart of the faith itself to cling to the spurious, for the reasons I have been trying to explain.

TD: Because you didn’t want to have some sort of private faith.

ZA: Yes, the aspirations for the faith itself were higher. And so during that period of time I was willing to risk going to hell myself sort of for the sake of the integrity of the faith. It was my faith itself that was making this possible. I consciously was risking hell myself rather than accept a position that God surely could see is spurious and therefore unworthy of acceptance. I know this is an odd and big claim. It is a bit embarrassing to make it.

TD: Yes, it is a bit embarrassing to hear it too.

ZA: But it is true. I am not claiming really to have imagined very well what it would be like to be in hell—

TD: Hell isn’t a place, you know.

ZA: No.

TD: It’s a state of mind. A state of alienation. Obsessed with self, a lot of people are there already.

ZA: Yes.

TD: Anguish accompanying a delusive sense of radical personal independence. I know it well.

ZA: Right. I’m very sorry. The kingdom of hell is within you.

TD: Yes. As Jesus said.

ZA: No.

TD: No?

ZA: Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is within you. But I guess it would follow.

TD: I know my sense of radical independence is delusive but I can’t break out.

ZA: It’s not just you, everybody has to deal with that.

[silence]

ZA: Well.

[silence]

ZA: Here. Take a tissue.

TD: Thank you.

ZA: Well. Uh.

TD: I’m sorry.

ZA: The Buddha was right on top of this, you know.

TD: What?

ZA: The hell of self-centeredness within us, that’s what his whole deal is about—getting freedom there.

TD: Oh.

[silence]

ZA: Well, then.

TD: Yes.

ZA: Getting back to me—

TD: Right, pour your heart out, sister.

ZA: Well, if you don’t want me to—

TD: No, no, please—

ZA: We could talk about something else.

TD: Go ahead.

ZA: Whatever.

TD: I’m ok now.

ZA: So I was saying there was this period of time when I consciously was willing to go to hell—

TD: As some place—

ZA: It was vaguer than that, it was some sort of situation waiting for me after death—I was willing to accept that result rather than compromise and accept a sort of private faith in this life. Consciously, quite vividly, I was risking hell for myself in abandoning specifically Christian beliefs and practices, because it seemed with all my heart that God could not possibly value our focussing on such things in the way that I had been doing all my life until then. My thoughts and feelings were so different from those behind Pascal’s pessimistic wager, where he uses his new probability calculus: even if the odds of God’s existing are very small, he says, hell would be an infinitely horrible outcome compared with what one gives up to devote oneself to God in this life, so one should strive to believe in God just to be safe. His gamble is grounded in fear and depression. My gamble was grounded in joy and faith.

TD: I believe Nietzsche called Pascal sick.

ZA: Yes, Nietzsche nailed it exactly! My faith could never accept Pascal’s ridiculous reduction of the very ground of religious life. What I got from my folks was life-affirming, it was not life-denying. It was grounded in love, not fear. As far as I was concerned at that time, Nietzsche’s denunciation of Pascal as a sick soul was Holy Writ, it was divinely inspired. This was not merely an intellectual pose for me, or a move in a chess game. It was the central issue in my life as I conceived it.

TD: So you resigned yourself to hell. Ha-ha.

ZA: No. Not at all. As I said, there was a period of time when that seemed possible. And I was wagering, I was taking a risk, I saw vividly what was at stake, including what I was risking if God is the way Pascal assumes. But basically my faith in the love of God also was optimistic enough not to settle into that sort of depressing fear. My European Enlightenment roots in Wesleyanism came to the rescue. Things should make sense. God cannot be that dumb! God surely can see what my own situation is, can see that I am sincere, that I am trying to be true to what is genuine and essential—and that I am simply letting go of the spurious! My ability to think this way was an expression of my faith in a fair and loving God, whereas Pascal’s wager presupposes that God is a complete moral idiot.

TD: Huh.

ZA: And then something completely unexpected happened to me. I totally stopped thinking about God. This didn’t happen all at once, but over a relatively brief period of time. Thoughts about God stopped occurring in the normal flow of things as they had been doing ever since I could remember anything at all. I was not thinking about God at all—and not merely because God wanted me to think about other things.

TD: Well, that’s quite a story you got there. Ha-ha.

ZA: The theistic framework simply unraveled and it completely disappeared from my mind. The concept of God became idle—it was not a live concept any longer. Questions about God were no longer serious questions.

TD: Ok then. Why don’t we take some calls now. We’ve got a caller from Seattle. Brent, you’re on.

Caller (Brent): Why did you say what C.S. Lewis did is a cover-up job? Why doesn’t that just solve the problem of exclusivism? If Plantinga’s appeal to mystery solves the problem of evil, why doesn’t Lewis’ suggestion that we don’t know solve the problem of exclusivism? Lewis says, as you read it, we do not know that only those who know Christ can be saved through Him. So he gives us a milder form of exclusivism. That basically is what John Hick says too. Why didn’t that milder revision of Christian belief work for you?

ZA: True, Hick is great. I read Hick during the time I was trying to get clear about all this. Hick was following Ireneus, the 2d century Christian who believed that the Christian Gospel means that everyone eventually will be redeemed, one way or another. Perhaps in a future life.

TD: So the caller asks a good question. Why didn’t that solve the problem?

ZA: Another option would be to say at least that everybody at least gets a fair chance, some in a future life, even if some eventually refuse.

Caller: So why didn’t you accept that sort of solution to your problem of exclusivism?

ZA: I am trying to tell you. I will tell you, but let me read this first. It is what Lewis says next. That will help me explain it, I think: But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who alone can help them.

Caller: What’s wrong with that? You are worried about the strangers on the outside. But that doesn’t mean you should stay on the outside yourself!

ZA: Well, first, this wasn’t quite relevant to me because I already was on the inside. I was trying hard to be a Christian. I already was a cell of the body of Christ, and it was my responsibility to care seriously about the people on the outside and that was exactly why I was trying to get the story straight—so as to be useful to others in converting them! But the whole issue of inside and outside evaporated.

TD: Why does the caller’s question set you on edge this way?

ZA: What do you mean, on edge?

TD: You won’t tell us why Hick didn’t solve the problem for you, and now you won’t tell us what is wrong with this last comment by Lewis. I’m not sure you’re being rational.

ZA: Well, let me tell you I did not come in here to defend my rationality. I know I was not irrational, I am sure of that. But what happened for me was a lot more important than rationality—we’re talking about freedom of mind and heart—we’re talking about love and honesty and real life.

TD: Right. Ha-ha.

ZA: By the way, would you please stop laughing at me.

TD: Ok, sure. Ha-ha.

ZA: Ok, I’m outta’ here.—I don’t need this bullxxxx—

TD: Relax.—Wait! -- Stop her!

[silence]

[silence]

TD: Ok, sit back down. Good. Just try to stay with the questions and explain yourself.

ZA: What are the questions?

TD: You said Plantinga’s solution to the logical problem of evil was good enough for you, despite its evasiveness. Why wasn’t Hick’s—

ZA: Look. I don’t know the complete psychological answer. Its partly in the shadow side of me, let us say, that isn’t fully transparent to me. I’m not really sure why Hick’s rejection of exclusivism wasn’t enough to keep me in the Christian fold. And I really am not claiming some sort of pure rationality. Hick is great. He struck me as having such an open mind. Reading Hick’s book Evil and the God of Love was a genuine relief to me. “All will be well,” he keeps saying. It is going to be ok! I was so happy to learn about Ireneaus and to see that his message of universal salvation had been expressed very early in the development of Christianity. It got left in the dust for arbitrary political reasons—but in any case it certainly was not refuted with compelling theological or religious reasons. And it is available now for thoughtful Christians.

TD: So?

ZA: But perhaps I didn’t want it to be solved quite that easily. Looking back, perhaps I was actually sort of attached to being special. A sort of arrogance, being special, being better than others, having special information they needed.

TD: Because you followed the rules.

ZA: Yes. Don’t forget, I was a good Christian. I know that sounds a bit arrogant. But one measure of how good a Christian I was is that in fact I wasn’t arrogant.

TD: That sounds like double-talk.

ZA: I don’t think it is double-talk but maybe you are right. Perhaps I just hid arrogance well, even from my own relentlessly evaluating mind. In any case, I was on the winning side already. And I had a lot invested in that. Maybe I liked the competitive aspect, the ultimate big-time division between the sheep and the goats. Maybe I liked the melodrama being played out, especially where, as a Christian, I had special information that other people desperately needed. And there almost certainly was an all or nothing assumption at work in my mind just as we saw it in Lewis—either accepting the Christian faith in this life is absolutely necessary to avoid going to hell or else it really isn’t important at all. Given Hick’s and Ireneus’s solution the drama is gone. It would be like playing basketball but not keeping score. I probably implicitly assumed or felt things like this, and after it became clear that it cannot be all important in this life, it became of no importance, and it simply dissolved.

TD: But why—

ZA: Because from day one my life and faith were conceived as part of something much vaster, potentially shared by all, and that was of extreme importance within this life. This was the evangelical side of me. It was of utmost importance to know Christ, and the need was universal.

Caller: But for Hick it still is potentially shared by all even if they do not have to know Christ in this life.

ZA: Yes, I know. But now, we have a basic division in this world between those with access to the special knowledge—the personal relationship with God through knowing about and accepting Christ—and those on the outside. Even if it eventually is universally shared in some other life, here and now in this very world it is not universal. And so the faith isn’t of utmost importance in this life. One can be saved even without knowing about Christ at all, which is what we’ve been saying all along, even Lewis had to admit it although he seems to forget it right after admitting it. There is a deep incoherence in the evangelical Christian guidance for living in this world: it says its message is essential, but obvious facts about the world are such that it cannot possibly be essential in this world. It would be easier if its message were that God is cruel and unfair, in which case Pascal’s wager might make sense. But that wasn’t the message. We are talking about the God of Jesus.

TD: So you want to be special, you want people to have to know what you already think you know, you want the evangelical melodrama, so you simply preferred to switch to the outside rather than revise your beliefs to be like Hick’s?

ZA: Well, it wasn’t merely preference. And my response definitely was not a switch to some outside. The difference between inside and outside simply disappeared. The deep message of Christianity has to be that there is no difference between inside and outside. Or if there is a difference, it isn’t characterized in terms of the religious beliefs and practices that had been part of my life. It has to be something universal and shared in this life.

TD: Would Hick agree?

ZA: I don’t know. For all I know, most Christians nowadays might agree with me, maybe even many Nazarenes. I would certainly hope so, and I hope I’ve been answering your questions so that I am not contributing to stupid and pointless disputes about this sort of thing.

TD: Why don’t you know what the Nazarenes think about this?

ZA: I have not been involved enough there to know. My preoccupation with these matters disappeared some time ago, and so I don’t know what is going on today. But I do know that many people with backgrounds similar to mine simply make a sort of angry switch to the outside, so there is bitterness and anger. Other people stay inside with Lewis and remain hazy.

Caller: When it dissolved did it seem like a loss?

ZA: Yes. I remember an ambiguous and paradoxical phrase would go through my head during that time, “I have left more than I have left”. And I could see it both ways. Have I lost a lot, left a lot behind? Yes, obviously --especially socially—most of my social world—you just can’t really participate in Nazarene churches without sharing the belief contents, since people want you sincerely to affirm that you believe the same things they do. So I was definitely outside of that. On the other hand, have I retained a lot, do I still have a lot left? Yes, of course. I am the same person, more firmly grounded in honesty and connectedness and joy. And I am not angry or bitter. Right now I certainly would say that I retained more than I lost—a sort of basic optimism. But of course I take it you disagree. You might think the specific beliefs are more important. We can’t expect perfect agreement about these matters—

TD: Ok, let’s take another call—

ZA: But where I will stand up and fight with you is if you really want to consign people to hell for disagreeing with you—

TD: Ok, Sally in Miami.

ZA: It’s like the hawks attacking squirrels in my backyard.

TD: I don’t think he was necessarily—

ZA: I will go out and try to scare them away if I see it happening, but it’s a losing battle because the hawks are hungry.

TD: Sally?

Caller (Sally): We are watching in this bar and we have an argument about something. Can you clarify it?

ZA: What?

Caller: In saying the ‘Devil of Hell’ wasn’t C. S. Lewis implying that there also is another Devil from Somewhere Else? I think so but these guys say there is only one.

TD: Whoa! Good question!

ZA: Well, I would have to agree with you. Looking closely at the text here, I would have to say yes. And there is, after all, that devil with

the blue dress

blue dress

blue dress on—

· I don’t really know where she is from. Probably New Jersey would be my guess. Haha.

Caller: Great! I’m right!

TD: Haha.

ZA: So when is this stupid interview over?

TD: Pretty soon. You’re doing fine. We’ve got a bunch of callers now, the board’s lit up. Kelli in Chicago.

Caller (Kelli): I want to compare what happened to me. Might your whole story be a sort of rationalization for breaking the rules?

ZA: Maybe so. By the time I was dealing with all this directly and consciously, I certainly was also alert and quite eager to find out about things I’d missed or not yet experienced.

TD: So perhaps you were just willing to go to hell in order to get to masturbate. Ha-ha.

ZA: No, sir! I already did that.

TD: Ok, then what? Go dancing? Ha-ha.

ZA: Whatever. Please stop laughing at me.

TD: Sorry. So isn’t your so-called shadow more interesting than all these rationalizations?

ZA: Yes, of course it is! It is far more interesting. But I thought you were asking me what was happening consciously. Why do I have to answer things I already explained—

TD: Al, you’re on in Phoenix.

Caller (Al): I have a few comments for your arrogant guest who thinks that she can sit there and suggest that the basic laws of physics are going to have to be revised simply because we don’t know what to make of the calculations—I myself have worked on those calculations, and it is true, there has to be a great deal more matter or energy in the universe than we understand, but this certainly does not means that we should even consider the idea that some revision in the basic laws that we used to make the calculation—

TD: Thank you, sir. Do you have a question for my guest?

Caller: Yes, if she is so smart why did it taker her so long to see that there is an irreconcilable conflict between science and religion?

ZA: Because I never did see that. So far as I can see, there is in principle no such conflict at all. In any case, that certainly was not the problem for me.

Caller: But you said that it was the discovery of dark matter that led you to realize that science was going to explain the mysteries of life, not religion!

ZA: Wow, you weren’t listening at all! I didn’t say that and I would never say that, since I don’t believe that. I really don’t think science has the tools to take the mystery out of life.

TD: Why not?

ZA: Because science is done using concepts, using conceptual thought. But, in my opinion, our own basic awareness goes beyond conceptualization.

TD: So where was the conflict?

ZA: For me it was at first a moral conflict, concerning God’s fairness; yet that also could have been resolved through maneuvers like Hick’s, as we were just discussing. So ultimately it was not a moral conflict either.

TD: Well?

ZA: It’s the same question as before. I could not accept a merely private faith, and then the difference between inside and outside evaporated. The theistic conceptual framework collapsed and disappeared without a trace, at least at the level of conscious thoughts and beliefs.

TD: Ok. Tom in St. Louis.

Caller (Tom): Thank you for telling your story, Zoe. But I do not see what is wrong with having a private faith. Ok. Obviously many people live and die without ever hearing of Christ. And equally obviously it would be unfair if they ended up on the outside, in a hell, for having missed out on something they had no fair chance to attain. I agree that God would not permit it, indeed it is an insult to God when people believe that sort of thing.

ZA: Yes, it would be insulting, and if I were God I’d send people directly to hell for an insult like that.

TD: What?

Caller: And I agree that Lewis did not follow through very well with his own suggestion about the importance of the limits of our knowledge about how salvation works. And so the military metaphor is unfortunate, when Lewis says God will invade.

ZA: Yes, it is unfortunate and if I were God I’d send people like Lewis—

TD: Caller, please go ahead.

Caller: But in the life of Jesus we have a revelation of something amazing. What is wrong—

ZA: I didn’t say there was anything wrong in general with having a private faith. I don’t think it is necessarily irrational or immoral to have such a faith. If you have it or want to have it, then go for it! But where I am willing to fight is if you start telling children that they or others will go to hell if they don’t see it the same way—

Caller: Yes, I totally agree with you. I will fight on your side against the hawks. It is like telling small children that we deserve to die. It breaks my heart when I hear stuff like that in my church.

ZA: Well, I heard that as a kid too. And that stuff just never sank in, and maybe that is why my story is as it is. I knew there was something to the talk about sin because my mind was sometimes angry, hateful, greedy and so forth. But obviously that did not mean that I deserved to die. That was such a weird idea. I had just been born! What were they talking about? Even bad people, like schoolmates who were bullies, they deserved to learn their lesson and get beat up, but not to die—

Caller: Yes, but what I am trying to ask is for you—why was it wrong for you to have a private faith that built on the good things?

ZA: I already tried to explain that, but I realize that I probably did not answer it very well. Having a sort of exclusive private faith just wasn’t at all in the spirit of where I was coming from, it conflicted with the heart of the faith itself as it had been cultivated in me and as it had in fact developed in me. I had a real vibrant faith that was not going to accept itself as being a merely private thing that might make my life better but wasn’t relevant to others on the outside.

TD: Cathy and Josh in Cleveland. Go ahead.

Caller: You look great!

ZA: Thank you.

[background]: We didn’t know Buddhists were SO HOT!!

ZA: Hey guys. Nice to hear from you.

TD: Friends?

ZA: My students.

Caller: After the concept of God became idle, is that when you became a Buddhist?

ZA: I’m not really a Buddhist. I don’t have any beliefs about rebirth either.

TD: But you meditate.

ZA: Oh, yes! And I’ve learned a lot from Buddhist teachers.

TD: Ok, Ethel, in Boston.

Caller (Ethel): Perhaps your guest is angry at dogs because only some of them chase squirrels.

ZA: I think she called before.

Caller: But tell her that my dog doesn’t chase squirrels.

ZA: What does your dog look like?

Caller: It is white and fluffy, it jumps up and down a lot, it has a green collar.

ZA: I’ll try to remember that the next time I am driving my car around in Boston.

Caller: What does she mean?

ZA: What streets for example do you like to walk your—

Caller: What does she mean?

TD: What do you mean?

ZA: Only joking!

Caller: Why does she hate my dog?

ZA: Look, it’s a dog’s nature to chase squirrels just as it’s a hawk’s nature to eat them. Dogs have been bred to protect human property. They’re not supposed to be likeable. They are supposed to be mean and keep the rodents away and growl at strangers, it’s in their genes.

Caller: But tell her my dog doesn’t growl—

ZA: Sounds like he needs to get in touch with his inner dog, then—better take him to a seminar!

Caller: What about her dog?

ZA: I don’t have a dog. I thought we covered that.

Caller: Maybe her dog is made out of that 90% dark stuff.

TD: What about Owens?

ZA: Oh, he was really nice.

TD: Alice is calling from New York. You’re on, Alice.

Caller (Alice): So did meditation become a substitute for prayer and everything about God that dissolved?

ZA: Thank you, that is a great question! I would not say substitute at all. There was a transition. When the concept of God became idle, I would still sit quietly, sort of praying without words or thoughts, more like listening. So I started meditating in this way on my own several years before I had any idea about what was known in Asia.

Caller: So what is known?

ZA: Wow, that’s a whole other topic. There are dozens of meditation methods, and they work. At least the ones I’ve tried.

Caller: Work for what?

ZA: One basic point is how our minds can shift from struggle to no-struggle. On meditation retreats I have observed this many times. Struggle/no-struggle are my terms for it. There actually is no widely shared term for it, since the various schools have not yet compared notes much. In Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, they call it access concentration whereas the Tibetans call it calm abiding, but they probably are talking about the same thing. It is a discrete and definite shift in consciousness. This can happen, and we can develop the skill to access it—these are facts that I have confirmed many times in my own experience during meditation retreats. It is a transition into the calm, concentrated mind. And it is good. It is a calm state of mind. But it is not passive. On the contrary, it is dynamic, active, stable.

TD: Hmm.

ZA: And this calm abiding actually is regarded as the lower end of the spectrum in terms of what is said to be possible. This is way more important than anything else I have to talk about.

Caller: Have you experienced anything above the lower end?

ZA: Some.

Caller: What?

ZA: Well, for example, experiences that are actually much like the heart-warming experiences I had when I was young. Except more grounded, and with more equanimity.

TD: Grounded?

ZA: More deeply grounded within the body. Grounded in calm focussed awareness, in the stability of concentration.

Caller: But this sort of experience would be very rare?

ZA: No, I don’t think it is rare. I believe it is common and ordinary. The basic experience is the kind, free heart. It is part of our lives. What is rare is to recognize it as such and appreciate it, and not to be distracted from it so fast by the million jillion things that we have to distract us.

Caller: The kindness.

ZA: Yes. We tend to rush past it, treat it as trivial, unimportant, because it isn’t based on conceptual thought. Yet when we calm the mind, get things in focus, in balance, then indeed it blazes—So to recognize this and appreciate it and to see if we can stabilize and cultivate it.

Caller: Can we?

ZA: Yes.

TD: So then you are always—

ZA: No, there isn’t any absolute state, so far as I know. And it isn’t any sort of perfection of the individual. It is a quiet vast intimate heart. I realize these words aren’t going to help much, but if you are interested you can definitely find out what I’m trying to talk about. I am not merely speculating about this.

TD: But it’s not an absolute state?

ZA: Something like a permanent perfectly free mind may be possible but I myself am not asserting that.

Caller: Do some people assert that?

ZA: The Buddha is depicted as asserting it; and so does John Wesley, actually. And they use remarkably similar language.

TD: Assert what?

ZA: That the mind can be totally and permanently free of negative emotions.

TD: But you don’t say it?

ZA: I don’t know if it is possible or not. It is well worth looking into it. But I would guess Wesley probably was simply extrapolating from his heart-warming experiences. And there probably is a lot of hype built into the basic Buddhist legends. Western meditators seem pretty gullible about that.

Caller: Well, most of them probably never had your background worrying about the historical Jesus.

ZA: True. In any case, those guys are dead and gone, we cannot ask them directly, and there’s no reason to get stuck speculating and debating about them.

Caller: Do you have to be an atheist to practice this type of meditation?

ZA: No, of course not! And it isn’t just one form of meditation, it’s not anything that specific. I would guess this is where the different spiritual traditions rendevouz.

TD: How so?

ZA: Where compassion is clearly the same thing as the freedom of the heart, the wisdom of letting go. Where one finds one’s life by losing it. Where the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, and thereby lives, as Jesus—

TD: So what beliefs do you have to have?--

ZA: It doesn’t matter what you believe. You can believe you are a poached egg if you are willing to look into it. That is my opinion. Various traditions do posit various beliefs as essential but I don’t see it that way at all. But everyone agrees it take effort and attention.

TD: It occurs to me that you might have got out of one conceptual box only to go on to put yourself into another box?

ZA: How so?

TD: The emphasis you seem to put on meditative practice, on methods.

ZA: That is possible.—Don’t forget, I come from Methodists! Haha.

TD: Beth in Miami.

Caller (Beth): I practice a form of Tibetan Buddhism. My main practice is to visualize images of gods and goddesses, usually in forms of light above my head. I reflect on their good qualities, then invite them into my heart. There can be a sort of vibrant connection between the crown of my head and my heart. What you talked about inviting Jesus into your heart as a child, it made me wonder if that wasn’t something similar?

ZA: No comment. Except YES!

[crash]

TD: You knocked over your chair. Here, please sit back down. So?

ZA: No further comment.

TD: Can you comment about why no comment?

ZA: This could be a really important point and I don’t want to be messing it up with my little two cents worth. I’ve only done that sort of practice a little bit. It was near the end of a year long retreat. I can’t really visualize much at all. My own practice is mainly body-based, not using visualizations. But anyway I was sort of gesturing in that direction, and whammo! It was so beautiful, and yes indeed very much like prayer as a child including a wide open spacious and free heart. But I shouldn’t say anything about it because I don’t really know much about how that sort of practice is done.

TD: Ok, then. We better move on then. Julia in Denver.

Caller (Julia): You seem like a nice and sincere person. But Satan is a subtle deceiver. It sounds like you had good intentions but it is easy for us to be blinded by Satan, so maybe that happened to you when the thoughts about God dissolved.

ZA: So?

Caller: So what do you think?

ZA: Well, why don’t we just ask him. Are you a subtle deceiver?

TD: Yes, of course, that is my job!

ZA: Ok, I guess you are right.

Caller: How can you be so nonchalant and make jokes about it?

ZA: Who in your opinion is more powerful, God or Satan?

Caller: God.

ZA: Ok, then. My faith was in God, and the process I described was grounded in that faith. The process took place because of my faith in God, who as you agree is more powerful than Satan.

Caller: But how do you know that Satan didn’t interfere, using your own intelligence.

ZA: Just because I’m intelligent doesn’t mean I did not have real faith. And I had real faith. My story isn’t about being misled by intelligence. I was being led by my faith.

Caller: Yes, but how do you know that the thoughts you had weren’t placed there by Satan and then blinding you somehow?

ZA: Because I really cared. I was thinking about strangers on the outside because I genuinely cared about them. It was not merely some sort of intellectual problem. The thoughts I described were there because of my faith. I was interested in those on the outside, and I took their situation seriously. Do you believe Satan works by getting people to care?

Caller: No, but when you talk about your shadow it suggests there was room—

ZA: That is just a way to say I do not understand everything that was happening for me, and there are interesting questions about what motivates us when we do things.

Caller: So maybe it was Satan!

ZA: Look. It seems to me you are trapped by an idea and you need to let go of it if you really believe what you said about God. You don’t trust me or my story. Fine. And why should you trust me? I’m just another talking head appearing on your tv screen. But you said you trust God. So in all sincerity I would ask you to consider exactly where your questions are coming from.

Caller: I am afraid of going wrong.

ZA: Fear.

TD: But there is no fear in love!

Caller: Like no mustard in the ketchup.

ZA: Right. So in moments when you have the fear that Satan might influence you, can’t you relax more and trust in the love and power of God?

Caller: Maybe. Thank you, I will try.

TD: Ok, we have Dr. C. Fred Alford on the line, calling from College Park, Maryland.

Caller: I have some ideas about the shadow. In my book about whistleblowers, I argue that whistleblowers blow the whistle because they dread living with a corrupted self more than they dread living in isolation from others. It is narcissism moralized, where you are striving to live up to a model of moral purity at any cost.

ZA: Maybe so.

Caller: You seem like a classic case of this, you are similar to Jesselyn Radack, who worked for the Department of Justice and was involved in the case of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. As you may know, she’d written emails critical of his treatment, including the conditions under which his confession was obtained, and after she found out some of her email exchanges with the terrorism unit were not part of the official files, she did things that eventually ruined her career.

ZA: Well, I see a similarity in your comment about moral narcissism, and I’d be happy to be compared to Radack. But I actually didn’t blow any whistles. That would’ve been the Hick-like response, to remain a Nazarene and insist on changes from the inside. But that’s not what happened. And what did happen for me certainly didn’t ruin my life. I was responding to and assimilating wider cultural forces. Overall it made my life easier and more interesting, indeed it made it better along the parameters with which I began.

TD: Ok, then. John’s calling from LA. Go ahead.

Caller (John): So I couldn’t figure out when exactly in your story did you become an atheist?

ZA: Never. Like I said, I just stopped thinking about God, the conceptual framework dissolved. That’s the best I can describe it. My best guess is that the pressure and tension of gambling on hell, if necessary, as a matter of principle and faith in the basic goodness of things—this did a real number on my mind. I just let go of all of that big time. I don’t have any beliefs at all about God.

TD: But—

ZA: Besides, the term ‘atheist’ has an oppositional connotation that does not apply to me. For most believers, the idea of theism goes far beyond mere intellectual assent to propositions. It also involves devotion, attitudes of gratitude, interest, service, and so forth—it involves a sense of relationship, as it did for me. We might say belief in God has these elements and goes beyond mere propositional belief. And I definitely had belief in God. When this framework dissolved it was not replaced by something that was anti-devotion or anti-gratitude. The term ‘atheist’ obviously can be used just to refer to propositional beliefs, but it also seems to have the stronger oppositional connotation as well.

TD: So you’re an agnostic or a skeptic.

ZA: I don’t think so. Those terms as normally used connote that the person so-described thinks the questions have some significance. I’m not an agnostic or a skeptic about the existence of God because I have no attitudes at all about God. Agnostics about theism think that there might be a God and there might not be but they don’t know or they want to avoid taking a position. I don’t believe that or feel that way, because I don’t have any beliefs or desires concerning God. I might not mind taking a position if serious questions presented themselves, but they don’t. There are, for me, no serious questions about God. The concept is idle.

TD: Whoa, this is getting trickier than expected. You would certainly have to at least believe logical truths about God, such as either God exists or God doesn’t exist.

ZA: I’m not being tricky. First, your example, excluded middle, is a logical truth only in some systems of logic. It might be true of reality, but it certainly doesn’t characterize belief systems. More importantly, even if I had to have such trivial beliefs, the concept nonetheless is idle relative to any substantive questions about life. I can talk about God, as we have been doing, and I know generally what the basic Christian concept of God is—a magnanimous and just person, the source of all that exists—but I have no non-analytic beliefs at all about God. The concept of God is idle. The theistic framework is gone, the theist’s problems are completely gone—there is in my mind no framework in which abstract questions about God are of any significance whatsoever. That sort of framework—which really had seemed to me before to be the basic framework—it unexpectedly dissolved away into nothing. It was a genuine and apparently permanent liberation for me. I do not discern even the slightest fear of rebirth whatsoever. States of joy and compassion, the warm heart—these states undeniably are real and good and present sometimes—and these states were freed completely from abstract speculation about such issues as God and rebirth, things that cannot be known.

TD: So let me see. You have no belief, then, such as the following. It would be unfair for God to punish people who fail to get saved.

ZA: Uh. Well. Actually I would have to say that I do believe that. But that just has to do with the concept of God. If the Christian God exists, then nobody is going to some hell by virtue of not being a Christian.

TD: So you do have beliefs about God, after all. Have you really thought this through?

ZA: I thought I had it figured out. But honestly I don’t reflect on this any more. It is not important, it doesn’t matter how it is analyzed. Doesn’t saying I have no non-analytic beliefs make it work?

TD: Perhaps a distinction between 3d person and 2d person concepts of God would help you think more clearly about this.

ZA: What do you mean?

TD: You do have 3d person beliefs—such as the one I just mentioned. But what dissolved for you were all 2d person attitudes, such as those you had earlier when praying. You want to say the concept became idle because it primarily had been a relational concept since you were very young and were inviting Jesus into your heart, or inviting God’s Spirit into yourself. And then in the crisis over the possibility of your own going to hell—

ZA: --Right! That is what dissolved. The 3d person questions were never of much interest anyway. God was a being to be known personally, a being to whom I assumed I could address thoughts and spoken words directly.

TD: So the whole process—identifying with the strangers who did not have access to the information, then coming to see the whole thing as spurious, then it actually becoming spurious for you—took place within the context of a 2d person mind set, where before you’d not merely had beliefs, but had belief in God, as you said. It wasn’t merely that God would be unfair, it was that YOU would be unfair.

ZA: Right. YOU could not possibly be so careless and unfair as to set things up in the way people believe when they consign strangers to hell. And then the 2d person structure dissolved completely. It was quite freeing. Instead of relating to the world through You, for the sake of You—I was simply in the world, relating to the world directly.

TD: So you agree now that you do have the 3d person beliefs?

ZA: Well, wait a minute. Actually I don’t think that anybody really has coherent 3d person beliefs about God—at least not beliefs that can be easily discussed in English. First, God is personal but, secondly, God cannot possibly be inherently male. That was clear to me by the time I was 8 years old. There is no way being male is built into the basic hierarchy.

TD: So?

ZA: So there is no way to use English pronouns coherently with respect to God. ‘He’ doesn’t work. People say ‘She’ but they’re being contentious, to contrast with ordinary usage. Anyway God isn’t inherently female either. Using ‘It’ undercuts the personal.

TD: Ok, we have more callers waiting. Tiffany in Atlanta, you’re on the air.

Caller (Tiffany): I don’t think you really can support your squirrel-loving views based on the Bible. Can you give me even one Bible reference that proves that squirrels are not going to hell?

ZA: Yes, I believe there are passages in the Revelation of St. John about squirrels chasing each other around the throne of the Ancient of Days.

Caller: Really?!

ZA: Wow, freedom of religion is a beautiful thing, I really mean that.

TD: Louise from Columbus, go ahead.

Caller: HOW DARE YOU MARVIN GO ON TV DRESSED UP LIKE A WOMAN TALKING ABOUT DOGS USING THAT STUPID VOICE PRETENDING TO BE THAT FLAKY ARTIST—

ZA: Louise?!

TD: Whoa!

ZA: This is Louise—

TD: You’re not a woman?!

ZA: Not really.

TD: Nicely done!

ZA: You didn’t know?

TD: I had no idea!

ZA: But I thought you picked it up when I mentioned the blue dress.

TD: Why you little devil!

ZA: Hmph.

TD: Very impressive!

ZA: Thank you.

TD: Who’s the artist—

ZA: Zoe Alexis, in Seattle? She told me it would be ok if I pretended I was her.

TD: Hmm. Well.—In that case, I have a little surprise for you too.

[silence]

ZA: Bill?--

TD: Yep, it’s me! Don’t tell Hillary!

ZA: But we’re on tv!

TD: That’s what I mean.—Nobody tell Hillary!

ZA: Wow.

TD: Sorta’ surprised ya’, huh?

ZA: Yes.

TD: Yep, it’s me.

ZA: Yes, I see.

TD: I needed to get out of the house more.

ZA: You didn’t really seem much like the devil, come to think of it.

TD: I was just pretending to be the devil thrown out of heaven, and all that stuff about delusive independence. I wasn’t really crying.

ZA: Hmm. Well, as for me, I was trying to tell the truth all along, but it seemed easier to use a fake voice.

TD: Ok, that’s good.

ZA: What happened to Louise?

TD: I have this little button—

ZA: Can we listen—

Caller: THEN READING PAGE AFTER PAGE OF C.S. LEWIS, THEN TALKING ABOUT YOUR SHADOW, THEN THREATENING TO KILL SOME POOR OLD LADY’S LITTLE DOG, THEN COUNSELING CHRISTIANS ABOUT THEIR FEARS, THEN THAT NO-BELIEFS-AT-ALL CRAP, THEN TO TOP IT OFF LETTING THE DEVIL DO YOUR THINKING FOR YOU—

TD: Caller, can you speak a bit more quietly please?

Caller: NOW EVERY GODDAM RIGHTWING CHRISTIAN TALK SHOW HOST IN THE COUNTRY WILL EQUATE MY BOOK WITH YOUR STUPID

TD: Ma’am, could you please watch your language a little bit? This is a family show.

Caller: NO IT IS NOT THIS IS xxxxIN’ WAR-MONGERING FOX

ZA: Bill.—Its Louise.—Antony.

TD: Who?

ZA: The editor of the book!

TD: Oh, Louise! I didn’t recognize your voice at first! So good to hear from you! Welcome to the show! You are my favorite philosopher!

Caller: Well, xxxx you! Why didn’t you invite me to be on rather than this bimbo poser?

TD: Well, I will, I will. How about next Tuesday? I personally do not like dogs either—

LA: It’s not about—

TD: And I completely agree that Zoe did not clarify—

LA: It’s Marvin!

TD: Louise, can you also stay on the line right now for our other callers?

LA: No, I’m sorry. I need to call my lawyer.

TD: Sherisse, from Detroit. Go ahead. Sherisse?

Caller: Yes, is Professor Antony still there?

TD: Louise?

LA: Yes I’m here.

Caller: I just heard about your dog-hating book. But I wanted you to know that God still loves you—

LA: Listen you little twit. Why don’t you witness to Marvin? He’s the one hogging all the attention!

Caller: Oh, what he said makes sense. We knew it was him all along because my brother is in his meditation class at Bowling Green and he told the class what he was going to do. I liked the explanations about love and fear in your heart?

MB: Good. Thank you.

Caller: I also liked it about getting out of the hell of self-centeredness. I think maybe I need that?

MB: Yes, we all do.

Caller: I have a suggestion?

MB: What?

Caller: I would say use less eye shadow?

MB: Ok.

Caller: Also don’t sing so much? You sound like Madonna. Also you need to calm down a little bit?

MB: Ok.

Caller: Also, Mr. Devil?

TD: Just call me Bill.

Caller: Bill, did you know that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?

TD: No!

Caller: Yes! But you are going to end up in hell if you keep showing the Paris Hilton—

MB: Hey Sherisse!

Caller: What?

MB: How old are you?

Caller: 13.

MB: Did your brother tell you how to meditate?

Caller: Not really. He taught it at Sunday School when he came home for Fall break, but I didn’t get it. I want to take your class, if I can go to college?

MB: Great, you can. But you don’t have to wait for a class. You can do it right now. Just take a few deep breaths, then relax into the normal breath. Wait for it, observe what it is.

Caller: What what is?

MB: The breath. Sit with a straight back, relax, and begin simply by knowing in each moment whether the breath is coming in or going out.

Caller: You mean breathing?!

MB: Yes. I realize it sounds trivial, since you are accustomed to being abstract. But you won’t regret this. Focus for awhile on the normal sensations in your nose or chest. When you notice your attention has wandered away from the breath, bring it back gently. Feel your body from the inside, how real it is, how amazing it is to be—

LA: xxxx YOU BELZER! Now it’s the Buddhist Missionary Hour! I can’t believe—

MB: Louise, I tried to tell you—

LA: Joe, get me Johnny’s number—

[background]: … can’t keep calling him about every little thing.

TD: Ok, my friends, I’m afraid we’re all out of time. Please join me next Tuesday with Louise Antony when we’ll continue our discussions about her fascinating new philosophy of doglessness, and don’t forget tomorrow we’ll have Saddam Hussein with his book, Dictators without Dogs. Thank you to all my guests today. Good-bye now.

· End transcript—