The Baseball metaphor

I have a sudden need to elucidate what I believe. Mostly it’s for myself, I guess, to reassure myself that I have any beliefs at all, and am not just one of the billions floating through life just looking out for number one, and not having any more substance to me.

I think of God’s relationship with the universe like someone who has set up a baseball game. This is an imperfect metaphor, so work with me here. Sometimes you would have to try to imagine what would happen if real baseball functioned like this.

So God set up the game. He makes the field and sets the rules. Some of these rules are known to the players; some are unknown at the start but still essential for success. He gets the players together. Then, He sits back and watches. He's more like a commissioner than an umpire. He is not visible. He gives directions to only one player at a time, so quietly that they have to be really focusing on paying attention to hear. There is the occasional overt attempt to intervene (think 2000 years ago), but for the most part, His presence is not something that you'd notice if you weren't consciously trying to. Occasionally the commissioner steps in and yanks someone from the game. You still don't physically see Him doing it, so you may grow to doubt that He is responsible for the removal of the player. And sometimes you know why, sometimes you don't.

Main idea: the players all have free will. They act however they choose to act within the bounds of the unbreakable laws (such as gravity).

Regarding the transmission of the rules and laws, some are given, and spelled out very clearly (3 strikes and you’re out/ Thou Shall not Kill). However, the rulebook is very old, parts of it have been lost, and it has been recopied so many times that there is question about which parts are original and which parts have been altered by this game of "telephone" many thousand years long.

For other rules, the players have to make discoveries by playing the game. This is akin to making scientific observations about their surroundings. They first need to figure out that they should investigate and ask these questions. Then they need time to discover and name these laws. They cannot initially formulate what effect gravity and inertia have on the ball, but once they do, that opens up a whole new depth of understanding the game. First we have the story of Genesis, then we discover the fossil record.

Then there are strategies: what play to call depending on various situational factors. This is like in professional baseball when the pitcher has to decide if a curveball is warranted in a particular instance, or if it behooves the batter to bunt rather than try to clock it with all he’s got. These strategies must be subject to the situation- who the players are, what the state of the equipment is. Strategies used 2000 years ago may or may not not apply now. The talking heads in the postgame show profess to be experts on the game and to know the mind of the commissioner. Should you listen to them? How would Jesus vote on gay marriage? Who do you believe?

Some rewards of good playing are immediately realized, but some, like being named MVP at the final banquet, are unknown until it's all over. The winners at the banquet don't return, and the award results are unknown to players who remain. Of course, since these players have free will, they choose whether or not to follow the rules. And because of the variety imparted by the unbreakable law of genetic variation, some are fairer players or better strategists than others. Success is variable.

Ambiguity abounds. You could win the game by playing excellently, or by cheating. A good yet fair player might be more well-liked than a cheater, but different people will place differing weight on what reward means most to them: winning or being well-liked. The perceived reward may not be congruous with the actual reward at the banquet. Since failure to follow the rules of the game is not immediately followed by the true consequence (such as ejection from the game) people may lose touch with the idea that breaking the rules has consequences. And the impatient or short-sighted may care more about winning individual games than winning an award at the banquet. You can see how such a system could quickly devolve into chaos. The players eventually find that it all runs more smoothly if they follow the rules and set up an umpire system. The umpires may have had some connection with the commissioner long ago, so assert that their authority comes from Him. Some fail to accept the authority of the umpires; question their interpretations. Then you have corruption and other human characteristics that compromise the integrity of the umpires. Is it any wonder that the players are confused?

What is the upshot of all this? Some people think God intervenes in every little aspect of everything. But I can’t reconcile that with the unfairness that I see. So I think He got it all spinning, like a top, and apart from the occasional intervention, lets it be. Lately, His interventions have not been physical. Those people whose kids died of cancer didn’t pray less hard, nor were they any less deserving. But He can put a thought in your head or give you strength to go on. It’s the only fair way I can perceive.

I can only hope that the final test is weighted to correct for all the various advantages, disadvantages, situations, etc, and there is some way to bring it back to apples-to-apples.

* * *

I have to tell the story of why I can't let this go, how I know that there is some type of higher power, but He limits his interventions to thoughts or feelings. Two things in particular happened to me in my lifetime that felt to me like being touched by a higher power. It may have just been my subconscious. Someone will always find a way to reason away someone else's experience because they cannot accept this as a genuine Godly experience. I myself do that all the time to explain why some have experiences at revivals: it was the crowd's high emotional state, not God, that they were feeling.

Anyway, the first happened one Christmas Eve. I was more miserable and insecure than your typical prepubescent girl because I was chubby and had been picked on by my brother and classmates my whole life. I had always loved Christmas time, but this was the first time Christmas did not work its magic on me. Trying to find something to wear for Christmas Eve festivities was very stressful, because I felt so fat in everything. You may trivialize the depths of despair felt by me, because others have it so much worse, but when you are that age, these "trivialities" can end your world. By the time I was trying to get to sleep, I was sobbing at the misery and self-loathing that filled me. So I prayed. "Please. Not on Christmas. Please let me be happy just this one day." I was silent for a while, eyes closed. Then suddenly, I was filled with the most overwhelming sense of peace. Not happiness, not delerious joy. Just peace. It would be all right. Not perfect. All right.

I opened my eyes. The clock read midnight. Christmas day had arrived.

The other one happened when my daughter was 2 or 3 years old. I am a leadfoot, and have the record of speeding tickets to prove it. I try very hard not to speed, but the endorphin infusion is addictive. Plus, I am chronically late. And very busy. Time spent in the car is time wasted. You know how it is: you see the state trooper parked on the median, too late to slow down. You look down at your speedometer and think, "Oh shit." You deccelerate anyway, cursing yourself, knowing you can't afford to spend a couple hundred dollars on a ticket, much less points on your license and your insurance rates going up. But today is your lucky day. He doesn't come after you. You think you're going to be a good little motorist for the rest of this trip but a couple minutes later you glance down at the speedometer, and there you are doing 75 in a 55 again. It's nearly impossible to stop.

So anyway, on this particular afternoon, I was driving down a clear, practically deserted highway to my mother's house. My mind was ranging everywhere, from mentally preparing to deal with the typical stresses of seeing mom, to all the other things that I had to do. Suddenly, there was a voice in my head, clear as day. "Why are you risking your daughter's life like this?" I slowed down, not even realizing I was doing it. The speedometer stayed smack at 55 for the rest of the trip. This was not me struggling to behave myself. I just did it. No effort. Just like breathing.

Later, after my visit, when I was putting my daughter back in her carseat, I realized that it was not buckled into the car. The last time we had switched the carseat from one car to the other, we had just set it in the car thinking we would buckle it in later. If we had gotten into an accident on the way to my mother's, my baby daughter would have been thrown around the car. Worse than an unrestrained passenger because of the weight of the car seat behind her.

The first time I was in despair. I was trying for a miracle. Maybe it could be explained away, except that I have not had that feeling since. The second time it just happened. Sure, my subconscious must have been aware that the car seat was not buckled but I had no reason to be particularly worried at that moment. I was the only one on the road. I have since tried to recreate that feeling. I have tried to bully and guilt myself into not speeding, thinking of all the results of car crashes I have seen: injuries, loss of life. But I can't do it, because speeding is an impusle for me. If that voice came from me, I can't access it anymore.

Never-ending mental wrestling match

My whole problem is that once I start looking at something a certain way, I can’t un-see it. It is a lot like those optical illusions with the faces and the vase, or the old and young ladies. All I see now is Ishmael’s evolution myth: “The world was made for man, and man was made to conquer and rule it.” For the uninitiated (those who are unfamiliar with Daniel Quinn), the operative word there is “myth.” Our concept of evolution puts humanity as an end-product, the pinnacle. This is hubris.

It is completely absurd for man to believe that the entire universe, for all those billions of millennia, were all leading up to what? This? Humanity’s rule of the earth? Look at the mess we’ve made of everything!

It also seems absurd to believe that we can’t look for answers in the very universe around us- evolutionary biology, physical laws, etc. Should religion and the natural world be at odds? Why? Because it’s the ultimate test of faith to disbelieve our eyes?

So what is the point of it all? Of life, the universe and everything? The problem is, the more time I spend thinking about it, the less sure I am, and the more likely I am to do or decide nothing. I have been doing nothing religion-wise for the better part of 15 years, with teeny bursts of altruism thrown in when the good old Catholic guilt gets to be too much. So I guess I hope to convince myself that leading a good, altruistic life is the right thing to do regardless of what religion, or lack thereof, you subscribe to.

We could put the possible solutions to the meaning of life, the universe and everything into two categories-
1.) Explanations that would be self-serving as a species (that it’s all set up to benefit us in some way)
2.) There is no divine force interested in our fate. Everything is just a set of coincidences, happenstance, etc. and we’re just swept along for the ride

Category one, the self-serving possibility seems more suspect. We want to believe in explanations that put our importance paramount. That is a huge trap, choosing to believe in a thing because it makes you feel good. Unfortunately, most religions, including Judeo-Christian, fall into category one. Think about how unlikely very orthodox, ritualistic religions are. In a universe of infinite possibilities, what is the chance that something so rigid, including things that seemingly have no effect on others like dietary practices, could be the one and ONLY right way? Quinn’s premise is much more likely: there is no one right way.

And what if we take biological evidence such as evolutionary success to be an indicator, as Quinn suggests? Where there is no one right way but rather many: diversity itself is the right way. Does that negate the very possibility of “right” and “wrong?”

Quinn rejects the notion that the human way the right way because we’ve been so extraordinarily “successful” that we have overrun and despoiled the earth. No, don’t go getting cocky, humanity. The jury’s still out on you. Humanity may have had this meteoric rise in the past couple millennia, but the fall may be just as quick and fiery. Not much different than the span that the dinosaurs “ruled” the earth. I’d think that the one right way, if it exists, has to be a way that will be sustainable within our resource constraints, and is more peacelike than warlike.

I keep coming back around to this idea I have, but I fear it also falls into category one. This idea is my justification for the time and sleep I waste in this never-ending mental wrestling match. That it serves a purpose at all. Therefore, it is so extremely self-serving that it almost has to be incorrect, but perceiving justifications for your actions is so addictive (my opiate). My idea is that there is a set of absolute truths out there, each piece known to someone who has been or is yet to come. If only someone were wise or clear-seeing enough to collect and collate it all. This is attractive but it again puts humanity in a position of central importance because they are the vessel through which the ultimate truth can be discerned. But the simple fact is that we are the only species known to us with these observational and reasoning capabilities. So is it really a category one?

What’s the point anyway? Why do I waste my time with this? I can’t hope to figure it out. We couldn’t possibly have the capability of understanding God (if there is one) or His plan (if there is one). We are not on the same level. It’s like a flea trying to understand the nuances of Shakespeare or Mozart. But I can’t let it go.

Quinn talks about evolutionarily stable strategies, or the idea that the correct ways of existing are those that ensure the survival of the species. Are people really just the expressions of infinite, random genetic combinations and permutations? Some that work better than others? Using a strictly scientific lens is cold. Let’s face it: we’d rather have the warm and fuzzy feeling we get of not only being the absolute it as a species 6 billion strong, but that we all matter as individuals. But, leading an altruistic life is still a good choice in this paradigm- it would seem to be an evolutionarily stable strategy. A species that works cooperatively and does not over-consume its resources should work better than one that’s greedy and conflicted. But how important is the individual? Isn’t my very thinking about this an effort to stand out from the crowd? Don’t I have some megalomaniacal sense that I could solve all this better than the untold billions of others who have existed and taken on the mental wrestling over the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

It is good, as Daniel Quinn suggests, to look to what God created to discern what the laws are, and maybe something of the nature of the Creator, but I see no evidence that fairness happens at all, so maybe that is a simply human wish. All I got left is that “made in His image" thing. BTW, just a comment on the issue being made recently about the masculinity or femininity of the divine, we were made in “His” image BEFORE we were split into sexes. So give it a rest and move on to other things.

To be fair, our final “test” to get into heaven should be weighted to correct for the effects of nature (genetic predisposition) and nurture (family/social/life circumstances). But this seems at odds with the value placed on evolutionary success. What’s the moral value in a big testing ground for the purpose of weeding out those unfit for a higher or better place if there is no fault or blame; just randomly varying amounts of empathy, moral fiber, circumstance, etc.?

My problem is that I can’t get past fairness. And hope. Even though there seems to be no room for these concepts in the natural order of things. Sometimes, quite the opposite. I need to believe that every one, as a newborn baby, had the possibility of doing the right things if given the proper circumstances. I wonder about this “knowledge” as the fall thing. Because it seems that the way we were as newborns and little children is humanity at its best. It’s a time of innocence and a time when almost everyone (except for severe sociopaths who are but a flawed genetic permutation) could have become a decent if not saintly person. Like, everyone, even Hitler, could have gotten into heaven at this time. Why, if you had absolute power, would you set it up like this in the first place? Are there some laws of the universe that are beyond even God? Like the conflict between good and evil?

So why agonize about it at all? Doing good works and not trashing the earth seems to be the best way to live from all points of view (Phew- one thing figured out.) What made it ok for Mother Theresa to agonize is that she did great, selfless things for people while agonizing.

Question

This is a question for anyone. It can be asked of someone with different religious beliefs, because I am not very familiar with non Judeo-Christian religions. So the answer could be given in the context of those teachings. But religious beliefs become our own, so that even within the same religion, different individuals would have different ways of grappling with and answering questions such as this one.

In my job, I basically spend my time plumbing the depths of the human condition. And I mean humanity in the absolute raw: physical bodily functioning with all its frailties and shortcomings. I’ve learned that as a general rule, the best thing is usually a balance between extremes. What I have been lacking is soaring among the ivory towers of humanity: art, music, philosophy and such. I'm imbalanced in many senses of the word.

I left my job in Pediatrics because I could not put my feelings away in a little box. I could not give to the patients and their families the support and compassion they needed and deserved without me stumbling over my own grief and fear. I was immobilized by it. Struck dumb. Those that could put their feelings aside, they were truly the most selfless people I have ever met. They put their desire to reach out, to touch, to help another above and beyond their own sense of self preservation. I could not leave myself open to that pain, so I knew it was better for the patients if I found somewhere else to work that was less of an emotional blitzkrieg. Thus the adult ICU. At least most of those people have led long lives, graced with lots of gifts (which they hopefully recognized). And if they die early or alone, it's usually due to their lifestyle and choices.

As much as I hate my job, I wouldn’t trade the experiences and perspective it has given me for the world. For most of us health care workers, it all becomes “just another day at the office.” We tend to forget our initial reactions to the whole expereince. The horror at the depths of suffering people experience. The excruciating pain of procedures, of the disease process itself, of laying there immobilized with your belly cut wide open and a Gore-Tex mesh holding your guts in. The shame and embarrassment people feel because their defenses and barriers are completely gone (being allowed to go there is a privilege most people won’t even afford their closest family, but we tend to see it as a burden rather than the privilege it is).

Sometimes they beg for death. Sometimes they get their wish. And sometimes that’s the best thing.

But along with all the bad comes the amazing. I've borne witness to the height of love, which is almost never realized until a loss is imminent.

As I said, sometimes the losses are the best thing. But what about the times when they’re not? There’s the story of the baby boy who had short-gut syndrome, which basically means that he was born without parts of his intestines and liver. He spent his short life lying listless and jaundiced in a hospital crib, fed through tubes and subjected to frequent and painful procedures, only to die 8 months later by hemorrhaging out of every orifice.

So here comes the big question- what is the reason for this? What does your religion tell you? How do you personally answer this question?

I ask because, seeking the answer to this question was the only way for me to deal with what happened to some of my patients. My “faith” basically went the way of Santa Claus around the time I entered college. It was so easy to believe in and be comforted by faith when I was little, but I have not felt that in years. In college I learned that everything was not black and white as I had been taught. I could not apply my upbringing to figure out the grey areas- something may be right in one situation and wrong in another. Or the fact that some bad people go to church every Sunday and some good people never go. Some spectacularly good people, like Gandhi, are in a different religion altogether. And then there's the absolute clusterfuck that the “religious right” has introduced into American politics. I know that the “religion” (or a bunch of power-hungry old men) should not be confused with the faith, and that most of the religious leaders and bible-bangers do not embody the characteristics of the man they claim to worship.

So, participation in the ceremony of a particular organized religion did not seem to be the guaranteed ticket to heaven anymore. But I had enough experiences while in the Santa Claus phase that I cannot just dismiss the whole thing- I know just as deeply as I know my name that there's something higher out there. But does it have any control or even any interest in what happens to us?

I have a lot of knowing and very little believing. The advantage to this is that my adult worldview was arrived at mostly through intellectual means- weighing the value of various constructs like free will, service and compassion, and coming up with a set of beliefs that I hold because they resonate true within me, not because they were imposed upon me. But because religion was once so important to me, I can't just let it go. So I'm trying to fit what I think of Christianity back into this worldview like trying to find the right pegs to fit into holes.

I am trying to reason myself back into it, in other words.

Christianity offers a lot of conveniently well-fitting pegs. “Blessed are those who suffer and mourn,” and “The last shall be first.” This seems to tell me that all those children who suffer will be rewarded by getting into Heaven. The more one suffers, the more their celestial savings account is built up, and those people are practically guaranteed a spot. The ones who have to worry are the ones like myself who have a pretty easy (or “blessed”) life, because it is incumbent upon us to deposit into our own celestial savings accounts by making conscious decisions to be good, help others (feed the hungry, clothe the poor) and so on.

Many people ask, “Why does God let this happen?”

Who would hold the price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there’s some immortal power to control the dice?
(Roll the Bones, Rush)

Well, I think free will (a.k.a., the fall from Eden) explains it. The world was set spinning (in a manner of speaking) subject to certain laws like gravity. This includes the enormous variety of human attributes caused by genetic mutation. We can, if we choose to, control our own behavior (as long as the test is weighted to allow for the effects of nature and nurture). I think many things blamed on God or fate for are actually caused by people: wars, a system for acquiring food that is grossly skewed in favor of the “haves,” pollution and lifestyles that cause disease, and so on. There is still some left unexplained, but that just represents a lack of knowledge on our part. Like labeling epileptics as possessed.

Bu all these attempts to reason with myself do not really get me where I want to be, which is having faith. My grandfather had faith. One day he was visiting my brother’s house and he saw a tank full of baby fish. He exclaimed how he was in awe of the Creator, to have made such a wonder. How many people would have that as their gut reaction to a tank full of baby Mollies? When he thought he was dying, he called a priest, not 9-1-1.

Does your religion offer any insights on my dilemma?

Sometimes I think I would give my right arm for my grandfather's kind of faith. I can only imagine with the direst longing the kind of contentment and peace that would bring.