OMG!

It’s admittedly a bit of a stretch, but I think I know how someone with liberal leanings must have felt during the McCarthy Era. In my case, it has to do with the subject matter of my novel skyfisher, which debuted on Apple’s iBookstore three weeks ago and will hit mainstream venues this week.

 

The story in skyfisher deals with three ad men who conspire to create a fictitious religion as  a dot-com get-rich-quick scheme.  Now, I’m not interested in writing simplistic, purely plot-driven potboilers (not that there’s anything wrong with that – some of my best reads have been potboilers) and since mythology, comparative religion, and human spirituality have long been reading interests of mine, I wanted to explore those areas a little further in the book. In doing so, I actually did not condemn or debunk human religion. Aside from the fact that I felt a spiritual tone made a nice literary counterpoint to the fraud and cynicism emanating from the storyline itself, it reflects the open mind I’m personally trying to keep on the subject.

But now, people have taken to asking me straight out whether I’m religious. There’s nothing wrong with the question per se, it’s the way people ask it. It’s like they’re asking me if I’m a terrorist, or on a day pass from the loony bin. OMG! Religion has become way uncool in contemporary western urban culture.

It all came to roost this week when Steven Hawking actually went on the record as to say modern physics has officially eliminated God from the equation. Hawking’s great predecessor was never so bold. In fact, he once wrote:

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.
– Albert Einstein, The Merging of Spirit and Science

And that’s not a bad way of summing up my own position. Obviously I’m not in the same intellectual universe as Professor Hawking, but I do know he hasn’t even come close to unraveling the riddle of our existence. The arrogant folly of scientists who erroneously believed with utter certainty that they had all the answers has been seen countless times in the past.

However, to all the inquisitors, and for the record, although I was raised a Catholic I am not now or ever plan to be a card-carrying member of any organized religion (although I did recently take to putting it down as “Zen Jedi Phasmatian” on the forms I fill out.)  But I have cherry-picked several ideas (and ideals) from an assortment of religions and philosophies. I consider myself a spiritual being in that I strive to keep my karmic rap sheet as clean as possible, and try to open my mind to a larger, more mystical possibility than the one that says our human consciousness is nothing more than a freakish and meaningless by-product of the random cosmic mutation that is Life.

I haven’t the faintest idea whether or not God exists, and I make absolutely no predictions as to what transpires following the death of the body. But, for years I have openly worshiped one prophet, and offer his sacred words now:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V