A handful of philosophical quotes are attributed to Albert Einstein, and some of them are regularly trotted out by religious people to “prove” that the smartest human being ever was a man of faith. Among these is the famously enigmatic “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Who knows what the great man meant by that?

But this letter Einstein wrote in 1954 to philosopher and author Erik Gutkind is much less equivocal. In it, Einstein makes it clear that, although he respects religious people’s ethics and finds much common ground with them, he does not in any way subscribe to their notions of the supernatural:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

[...]

. . . it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e. in our evaluation of human behavior … I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.

I believe the essence of Einstein’s genius here is that he, unlike some other atheists, honestly expressed his views without rancor or derision toward those who believe otherwise. He further recognized that, not unlike the laws of physics, certain moral and philosophical principles are universal independent of belief in gods.  We should all strive to be so intelligent.

Modest Needs is doing charity in a way that I don’t think anyone else does. My favorite things about Modest Needs:

• It helps primarily the working poor — those who don’t qualify for government assistance specifically because they made the responsible choice to work to support themselves rather than sit back and collect taxpayer-funded aid.

• As a donor, I can choose to review individual applications for help and choose which ones to apply my donations toward. Of course, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to choose among the pleas of so many deserving and needy people. For donors for whom this is just too much, there is an option to have Modest Needs apply donations where it sees fit.
• The Modest Needs staff thoroughly vets each application, verifying income, liabilities, eligibility for other types of aid, and more.

There’s never been a better year in which to express thanks for what we have by spending some of our gift budgets on a cause like Modest Needs.

Which would you rather encounter in a dark alley?

This?

Geert Wilders

Or this?

Muslim protesters outside Geert Wilders's London speech.

I have nothing to add that the two photos above don’t eloquently say on their own. Sometimes pictures really can tell an entire story.

I’ve invented a brand new meme. I’m not saying I’m the only person who has invented it, as it does seem rather an obvious joke, but a quick Google search doesn’t turn up anyone else doing this. So for now, at least, I’m claiming it as  a Limits of Experience Original™.

The new meme will be riffing on that silly, sanctimonious e-mail signature addendum I keep seeing these days:

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

Anyway, I’ll occasionally post my own slightly more interesting and — I hope — more amusing variations on the “Please consider ____ before ____ing” theme.

See, I said it was obvious!

Sometimes they’ll be political, as in this timely admonition for CNN:

Please consider fact-checking your own stories before fact-checking a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Other times, they’ll just be funny, as in this plea to men headed to the beach:

Please consider your physique before donning that Speedo.

OK, that’s enough fun for me. Back to studying for the Civil War and Reconstruction DSST, which I’m taking next Wednesday.

This essay was the main project for the Historiography course I completed recently at Excelsior College. Considering the toil and sweat I put into it, I thought someone other than my professor should read it. So I’m inflicting it on my blog readers. All three of you! I’ve added images to jazz it up and linked some of the more arcane terminology to definitions on the Web.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

“Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!” Napoleon Bonaparte exploded upon learning that he had lost Saint Domingue and with it, his hopes for dominating North America.[1] Left with few options and a war against Great Britain to finance, Napoleon offered to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Thus, on May 2, 1803, the U.S. made an unprecedented acquisition that doubled its size and made it an empire. The deal, which even President Thomas Jefferson considered unconstitutional, led to a permanent shift in the nature of federalism and executive power.

Since at least the 1890s, historians have critically examined the Louisiana Purchase. Most early scholarship credited First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte as sole author and orchestrator of the matter, yet depicted President Thomas Jefferson as an avid expansionist who ignored his conscience with regard to constitutional construction. However, the past thirty years have produced a greater diversity of interpretation and analytical innovation. Where historians of the past often appeared driven by a need to pass black-and-white judgments on the event and its key figures, today’s scholars generally demonstrate more ability to discern shades of gray.

Some of the earliest available works on the Louisiana Purchase date from the 1890s through the 1920s. Henry Adams’s 1893 History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (republished in 1986) includes an engagingly-written narrative rich with detail, analysis, and opinion about “the greatest diplomatic success recorded in American history.[2] He credits Napoleon and his ministers as controlling the situation and notes the embarrassments the treaty provisions held for the Americans, which for him demonstrated “that the American negotiators were ready to stipulate whatever was needed for their purpose.”[3] He paints Jefferson’s political imperatives as being in direct opposition to his strict constructionist views and complains that, in abandoning those views, “Jefferson did not lead the way, but he allowed his friends to drag him in the path they chose.”[4] For Adams, these events sounded “the death knell of Federalism altogether.”[5] The shallowness of his interpretations indicates a positivistic focus on observable facts and a reluctance to consider the complexities of human agency. His harsh criticisms might reflect the disillusionment of the American Civil War, which was scarcely three decades past and had significant roots in the Louisiana acquisition. However, thorough and meticulous research redeems the work. Adams’s family connections – he was grandson of one U.S. president, great-grandson of another, and son of a senator and diplomat – gained him access to hitherto untouched European archives.

William M. Sloane’s article, “The World Aspects of the Louisiana Purchase,” appeared concurrently with the opening of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This dramatic retrospective cites no sources, and its vivid language frequently sounds ironic to the modern ear. Without actually naming Henry Adams, Sloane singles out that venerable scholar as “one of our historians” who believes the “far-fetched contention” that it was the black soldiers of Saint Domingue who thwarted Napoleon’s ambitions for a New World empire. Rather, “an act of God through pestilence” was the deciding factor.[6] Addressing Napoleon’s motivations, Sloane places greater emphasis on European concerns than New World disappointments. He is disdainful of Jefferson, the “philosophic theorist” whose foreign policy was ineffectual.[7] When he purports to know that American diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston felt a concern for Louisiana’s inhabitants that Napoleon lacked,[8] he sounds more sarcastic than sincere. Sloane’s preoccupation with the thoughts and intentions of historical actors may be a rejoinder to positivism.

The Congressional debates following the treaty’s signing receive extensive analysis in Everett S. Brown’s 1920 monograph, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803-1812. Like Adams, Everett examined many previously untapped primary sources, and his conclusions are similar to those of Adams but less colorfully expressed. He is less critical than Adams of the president’s turn away from strict construction, reckoning Jefferson felt that the common good could sometimes supersede ideology.[9] Brown’s analysis illustrates what a grave and complex problem the slave trade presented, yet his tone remains blandly neutral until he discusses imperialist aspects of the Purchase. He believed Constitution framer Gouverneur Morris would have found “justification for his statement that ‘paper restrictions’ would avail little in the face of American expansion.”[10] Continuing in this vein, he alludes to such far-flung dependencies as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, which the U.S. acquired in 1898 as spoils of the Spanish-American War.[11]

Everett Brown’s disgust with American imperialism presaged the New Left school of the mid-twentieth-century postmodernism, in which American foreign

Courtesy U.S. State Department

policy was dissected and criticized. Richard Van Alstyne’s 1960 book, The Rising American Empire, portrays a Jefferson (drawn from the president’s correspondence and other writings) who was, like Sloane’s, inept at foreign relations but bent upon American expansion. This Jefferson possessed a “reputation for intrigue,” and a “morbid jealousy on anything, no matter how remote or unlikely, relating to the American continents!”[12] He intended the U.S. to disperse emigrants that would overrun all of North and South America and displace existing populations.[13] Van Alstyne again seems to channel Sloane when he deems the constitutional crisis and the complications of financing the Purchase “high comedy.”[14] For him, the transaction was less an achievement for America than a “brilliant diplomatic victory” for Napoleon.[15]

Jefferson and America are slightly redeemed sixteen years later through extensive primary and secondary research in This Affair of Louisiana. Although Alexander DeConde’s Jefferson is far removed from Van Alstyne’s paranoid bumbler, and DeConde concedes the exigencies surrounding the acquisition, he still sees it as driven primarily by expansionist fervor. Quoting statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton and Patrick Henry, he concludes that the United States had always been meant to grow. Thomas Paine, in commenting on the constitutional problem, noted that the framers had probably deemed it wise to remain silent on territorial acquisitions in order not to disturb foreign nations.[16] DeConde is less critical of Jefferson’s departure from strict construction, seeing not vacillation, but rather the conclusion of a deeply conscientious thinker that strict constructionism must sometimes yield to doing for the people what “they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.”[17]

The 1990s ushered in a new trend that turned from comprehensive, mostly negative assessments of the Louisiana Purchase to a diverse mix of perspectives, emphases, and interpretations. Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson’s 1990 book, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson highlights Jefferson’s commitment “to secure American objectives by economic and peaceable means of coercion.”[18] They dispute Henry Adams’s view of the Louisiana affair as owed entirely to the Saint Domingue rebellion, instead viewing that circumstance as “only one element among several that Jefferson made use of in fashioning a diplomatic strategy for successfully countering French ambitions in Louisiana.”[19] After painting the stark contrast between the autocratic Napoleon and the democratic Jefferson, they note that even Jefferson could behave “with a degree of secrecy and discretion that resembled the most traditional representative of the ancien régime.”[20] Yet they still believe it wasn’t Jefferson’s vague threats of war and English alliance that worked to America’s benefit, but rather his patiently avoiding open confrontation while events in Europe ran their course.[21]

In 1992, David A. Carson consulted the works of Everett Brown and reviewed reams of correspondence and congressional annals for his article, “Blank Paper of the Constitution: The Louisiana Purchase Debates.” Regarding the conflict between Jefferson’s strict constructionist philosophy and “the need for expediency and practicality in government,” Carson points out that this was but one of “many debates between [Jefferson’s] head and his heart.”[22] In discussing Senator John Quincy Adams’s repeated pressing of the Constitutional amendment issue, Carson opines that, if not for the urgency of the situation, the two men might have worked together to secure a suitable constitutional amendment.”[23]

The array of Louisiana Purchase scholarship expanded further at a 2003 symposium commemorating the event’s bicentennial and exploring its constitutional significance. Peter S. Onuf contributed a paper that drew on Jefferson’s correspondence to demonstrate that, while revisionist interpretations of a passive role for Jefferson in the acquisition may be justified, they underestimate the Jeffersonian influence on expansionist momentum and on the ultimate shape of the nation.[24] “‘The Strongest Government on Earth’: Jefferson’s Republicanism, the Expansion of the Union, and the New Nation’s Destiny” reviewed Jefferson’s 1809-11 discourse with French political economist Antoine Claude Destutt de Tracy on the merits of Montesquieu’s theories that a republic must remain small and an empire was by definition despotic. Despite various differences on the nature of the ideal form of government, Jefferson and Destutt agreed on “the progress of political civilization,” and on the unique advantage presented by America’s expanding territory: surplus European labor had few options other than emigration, but Americans could “simply move on to greener fields.”[25] And while Jefferson believed the United States could be an “empire for liberty,” a letter he wrote to John Breckinridge soon after the Purchase illustrates his equanimity regarding the prospect that Louisiana might opt to separate from the east and become an independent nation.[26]

Courtesy Library of Congress

The year 2004 saw a compelling defense of Jefferson’s character in Bernard Sheehan’s article, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire for Liberty.’” Sheehan complains of the “currently fashionable practice of stressing Jeffersonian hypocrisy” and asserts that the president’s strict-constructionist lapse “remains a minor blemish on his biography.”[27] He explains that, in speaking of the “Empire for Liberty,” Jefferson meant this in universal terms, not as a call for expansion of the American republic.[28] He disputes Henry Adams’s portrayal of a passive Jefferson and points out the reasons for Jefferson’s ambivalence with regard to Saint Domingue: Initially, he had agreed to aid France in recapturing the island because it furthered the interests of the slaveholding U.S. But things changed when he learned of Napoleon’s grand plan to use the island as a launching point for his occupation of Louisiana. In justifying the Purchase itself, Sheehan emphasizes how a loss of access to the Mississippi could have weakened the union. Finally, he devotes much of the article to a spirited rebuttal of Roger Kennedy’s book, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase, which Sheehan claims attributes to the Louisiana Purchase all manner of modern American ills, from the cultural disintegration of Native American tribes to Walmart.[29] Sheehan doesn’t hold Jefferson blameless but defends him against the most egregious of Kennedy’s accusations.

In 2006, Sean M. Theriault published the first social-scientific analysis of the congressional debates. “Party Politics during the Louisiana Purchase” identifies this period as a key turning point in the “transition from a colonial government to modern-day democracy.”[30] For Theriault, the Louisiana Purchase debates constitute one of the first instances wherein the political parties put their quest for votes above their adherence to ideological stances,[31] and this reversal of party positions can best be understood by viewing the debate in the context of electoral politics. His methods are highly positivist, seeking to apply a quasi-scientific analysis to human decision-making through the use of charts, graphs, and a decision tree. The effort is impressive, and the thesis is logical. But the analysis itself considers only a finite set of possible relevant factors in the legislators’ voting decisions, and thus doesn’t provide a strong foundation for Theriault’s contentions.

In 2008, François Furstenberg drew upon numerous, mainly secondary sources to produce a sweeping study of “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” and advance the proposition that “the Appalachian Mountains were responsible for the great problem of North American, and perhaps even Atlantic, history from 1754 to 1815.”[32] In an incisive analysis of the world politics surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, he focuses on the importance of New Orleans and Saint Domingue to Napoleon’s plans to dominate Louisiana. Furstenberg credits Jefferson with shrewd foreign policy and with recognizing, as early as 1795, the potential that Saint Domingue held for American interests.[33] He postulates that, in promising and then withholding American aid for the French campaign in Saint Domingue, Jefferson deliberately lured Napoleon into a tactical folly that lost him the island permanently.[34] That loss not only forced France to abandon its New World hopes, but also removed the danger that a legitimatized Toussaint regime would tilt French foreign policy toward the anti-slavery cause.[35]

Two further 2008 articles examine different facets of American imperialism as

Courtesy U.S. House of Representatives

revealed through the acquisition of Louisiana and its aftermath. Julien Vernet’s New Left analysis, “Petitions from Peripheries of Empire: Louisiana and Québec,” considers the backlash that results from an imperial power’s imposing non-representative rule upon subject peoples who had prior experience of representative government. First Québec and then, four decades later, Louisiana, appointed representatives to petition England and the United States for the type of self-determination that the colonizers’ own citizens enjoyed. Both petitions reflect deep concerns with the courts, taxes, and commerce; heavily agricultural Louisiana sought the continuation of the slave trade as well. Vernet emphasizes the remarkable similarity between the governments established for the two colonies.[36] Both Jefferson and his appointed governor, William Claiborne, saw the Louisianans as an immature and incapable of self-government. The mayor of New Orleans stated the need to increase the American population in the region and thus assimilate it into the mainstream.[37]

Peter Kastor’s “‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’: Inventing Expansion in the Early American Republic” contradicts the contentions of DeConde and others that the acquisition was driven by an “inexorable expansionist impulse.”[38] To investigate the veracity of such claims, Kastor examined a series of pamphlets, travel narratives, and maps dating from before and after the Purchase. He found that the earliest pamphlets written about Louisiana applauded the peaceful nature of the acquisition but expressed more trepidation than enthusiasm about its implications for the country. Any glimmers of Manifest Destiny we now see in these cautiously optimistic writings were not perceived by their authors.[39] The shift toward expansionist boosterism in American literature came after the publication of William Clark’s official narrative and its accompanying map. Clark’s writing did not shrink from the perils and harshness of the frontier, but his works supplied the raw materials with which subsequent cartographers and writers built a more nationalistic, expansionist image of the West.[40] By the 1830s, the groundwork for John O’Sullivan’s 1845 use of the term “Manifest Destiny” had been laid.[41]

[2] Henry Adams and Earl N. Harbert, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York, N.Y.: Literary Classics of the United States, 1986), 334.

[3] Adams, History of the United States, 332.

[4] Adams, History of the United States, 363.

[5] Adams, History of the United States, 357.

[6] William Milligan Sloane, “The World Aspects of the Louisiana Purchase,” The American Historical Review 9, no. 3 (April 1904): 513.

[7] Sloane, “World Aspects,” 516.

[8] Sloane, “World Aspects,” 517.

[9] Everett Somerville Brown, The Constitutional History of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803-1812 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920), 28.

[10] Brown, Constitutional History, 32.

[11] Brown, Constitutional History, 32-33.

[12] Richard Warner Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 78-80.

[13] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 87.

[14] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 86-87.

[15] Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, 86.

[16] Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Scribner, 1976), 185.

[17] DeConde, This Affair, 184.

[18] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, ix.

[19] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 92.

[20] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 101-102.

[21] Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, 135.

[22] David A. Carson, “Blank paper of the Constitution: The Louisiana Purchase Debates,” Historian 54, no. 3 (Spring 1992) http://vlib.excelsior.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9601312138&site=ehost-live (accessed May 31, 2009).

[23] Carson, “Blank Paper.”

[24] Peter S. Onuf, “‘The Strongest Government on Earth’: Jefferson’s Republicanism, the Expansion of the Union, and the New Nation’s Destiny,” in The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898, ed. Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew H. Sparrow (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 41.

[25] Onuf, “Strongest Government on Earth,” 58-59.

[26] Onuf, “Strongest Government on Earth,” 62.

[27] Bernard W. Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire for Liberty,’” Indiana Magazine of History 100, no. 4 (December 2004): 346.

[28] Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire,’” 353-354.

[29] Sheehan, “Jefferson’s ‘Empire,’” 357-358.

[30] Sean M. Theriault, “Party Politics During the Louisiana Purchase,” Social Science History 30, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 294-295.

[31] Theriault, “Party Politics,” 295.

[32] François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” The American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 648.

[33] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 669.

[34] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 673.

[35] Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 672.

[36] Vernet, “Petitions,” 495.

[37] Vernet, “Petitions,” 498.

[38] Peter J. Kastor, “‘What Are the Advantages of the Acquisition?’: Inventing Expansion in the Early American Republic,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (December 2008): 1003.

[39] Kastor, “Advantages,” 1014.

[40] Kastor, “Advantage,” 1025-1026.

[41] Kastor, “Advantages,” 1031.

This week, the American Library Association is celebrating its annual “Banned Books Week.” There’s only one problem: They don’t actually have any, um, banned books to celebrate.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the ALA’s official Manifesto of Banned Books Week (a poor word choice if ever I heard one) can’t actually cite any books banned in the  United States. To make up for this embarrassing deficiency in literary oppression, they chose to include in their “banned books” count complaints made by parents requesting that their children not be exposed to specific books, despite the fact that only 1 in every 6 of these complaints found any traction at all.

As the WSJ points out, the mere act of asking that a book be removed from somewhere (especially an elementary school library) isn’t the same as banning the book. Private citizens can’t ban anything. Only the government can ban public access to a book, and that has yet to happen.

I understand the need for librarians to call attention to their libraries as the amazing yet often overlooked and usually underfunded community resources that they are. But how about we think of some less confrontational, and frankly, less dodgy way of doing so?

It turns out there might be benefits to having a Democrat in the White House after all. They certainly provide more fodder for political humor. And hey, laughter is quite possibly better medicine even than the vaunted, yet undefined, ObamaCare.

I’m still wiping my eyes over this one. I haven’t had this good of a laugh since Bill Clinton redefined sex. Be patient; the laughs in this movie achieve their breathless crescendo about two thirds of the way in.

The People’s Cube is my Official Guilty Pleasure™.

In Defense of Thomas Jefferson

It turns out an ugly rumor about someone I admire very much — a rumor even I had accepted as essentially proven — might not be quite ready for chiseling in stone after all.

William G. Hyland’s new book, In Defense of Thomas Jefferson (reviewed by the Wall Street Journal back on August 28 but strangely ignored by all the other major book-reviewing newspapers), is the result of a thorough survey of the scientific and scholarly work on Jefferson and Hemmings. Hyland found that, notwithstanding the DNA test results published by Nature in 1998, and Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer-winning 2008 exposé, The Hemmingses of Monticello, it is far from certain that Jefferson fathered even one of Hemmings’s children, let alone all of them.

WSJ reviewer Thomas Lipscomb writes that Hyland

concludes, emphatically, that the male Jefferson family member who fathered Eston Hemings could have been any one of at least seven males. There were, he notes, “two dozen-plus Jefferson males (with DNA markers in common) roaming Virginia at the time.” The seven include Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, who had already ­fathered slave children and who had been invited to ­Monticello nine months before Eston’s birth. Mr. Hyland does not exclude Thomas Jefferson as a possible father of Eston. But he deplores the false assumption that today’s limited DNA ­evidence can answer the ­question one way or another.

For me, this revelation of information that was available all along but deliberately not widely publicized illustrates two important lessons — one about science and one about politics.

First, a scientific study is only as reliable as the people conducting it and interpreting its results. It can be tempting for even the most highly qualified of scientists to overlook the preliminary or inconclusive nature of results that might be groundbreaking (or, in this case, merely titillating). And even when the scientists themselves remain appropriately circumspect, journalists and authors still get carried away in the quest for sales. Remember in the 1970s, when they warned us that saccharin caused cancer in lab rats?

Second, politics casts a long shadow over science, and the evolution/creation educational debate is only the beginning. There are findings that rarely get disseminated outside the most arcane journals because they are so extravagantly politically incorrect as to be taboo. Similarly, the Hemmings DNA research slotted neatly with the postmodernist trend of assassinating the character of Thomas Jefferson. We already knew he was an Evil, Imperialist, Capitalist White Guy and a hypocrite to boot, so of course he had children with his slave. How could he not have?

But it appears we don’t actually know any such thing. We won’t know for sure at least until the next giant leap in genetic testing capability occurs.

Bad for budding comrades.

Unreligious Right links to some of the coolest stuff on the Web. Today, he turned me on to a blog I hadn’t seen before, where a new post reproduces a translated list of rock bands that were forbidden in the Soviet Union in 1985. I must have been an extremely boring teenager, because hardly any of my favorites made the list.

A Reddit post by Ancient09 is about the best piece I’ve ever seen on how and why it’s difficult for religious believers to let go of their faith. As many atheists — I’m thinking probably the lifelong type rather than apostates like me — utterly fail to understand, a religious person has so completely built his life around faith that, to reject faith is to reject a huge chunk of what gives him purpose and makes him who he is. To say that’s not easy is a gross understatement.

Of the many relevant observations Ancient09 makes, this one resonated with me most:

Next, you must reject the idea that your path is somehow guided, that God is walking with you, that you are not truly alone as you walk through life. Imagine a man walking through a room on planks of wood suspended over spikes with large holes to fall in if you take a wrong step. He always manages to take the right next step, but he is never afraid because he “knows” that this is a solid wood floor he is walking on. Now turn on the lights.

Therein lies the difference between those (like me) who find it relatively easy to reject belief and those who find it difficult or impossible. I’m one of those people who was falling through the holes and getting impaled on the spikes long before I stopped believing. That god who I had been taught was always at work guiding me seemed to take an inordinate number of coffee breaks. This was equally, if not more, true when I was an innocent five-year-old than when I was a sinful 22-year-old.

I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who happens to step on all the right boards. Because I was stepping in the holes long before I had ever done anything bad enough that one could reasonably say it was God’s will that I suffer, I didn’t have much trouble rejecting my belief in a Jesus who loved all the little children of the world.

In yesterday’s Dallas Morning News, I read a poignant reminder of the mental gymnastics people go through to try to reconcile their faith in a god in the face of even the most inexplicable suffering. A 2-page feature article told of a pregnant couple who has learned their baby has trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality that guarantees death soon after birth. Rather than consider an abortion, as many people do now even when faced with the non-fatal trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), these pitiful people straightened their backs stoically and declared that this baby is the one God meant for them, and that it has a purpose.

I had to put down the newspaper at that point, so I’m not sure whether they have now already had the baby or if they are still awaiting their sad delivery. But the photo of the couple viewing tiny caskets while a salesperson looks on is almost too much to bear. That these people can cling to belief in a loving god is proof that, for many of us, a false comfort is preferable to no comfort at all. Unfortunately, it’s also proof of the needless suffering that religiosity can inflict on the religious.