I’ve been watching this video of the convocation at a mccain/palin rally with a certain degree of ... fascination. like so many things happening in politics right now, it’s a train wreck of logic and common sense. let’s unpack it a little:

REV. CONRAD: I would also add, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November.

So right away the hon. Rev. Conrad takes a tone with God, the supreme being, our creator, that resembles the kind of lecturing you hear from some of your less inspired high school football coaches. Step it up, Jehovah! Your reputation is on the line!

Because there are millions of people around this world,

Billions, actually!

praying to their god, whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah,

OK here’s where it gets ... weird. First, The right hon. Rev. Conrad seems to think there’s a god named “Hindu.” There isn’t. I checked. “Hindu” is an adjective. It describes the native religion of India, and its adherents.

Second, the Buddha is not a god, and Buddhists would be the first to point this out. The honorific “Buddha” comes from an ancient Pali word meaning “enlightened.” The Buddha Siddhartha Gautama was an ethical philosopher in India in the sixth century B.C. His followers revere him as a great person who attained spiritual perfection, but Buddhism, like Hinduism has room for many gods, one God (note capitalization), or no gods at all. None of which, it bears repeating, is or would be “Buddha.”

Moreover, neither Hinduism or Buddhism make any claim to exclusivity. They have no equivalent to the First Commandment (or the Second, if you’re looking at Deuteronomy). So it’s unlikely that very many Hindus or Buddhists are praying that Barack Obama wins just to show up that smartypants Jehovah.

And “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic. The Quran takes some pains to spell out that the God it discusses is the same God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. So the people that the right hon. Rev. Conrad imagines praying to “Allah,” presumably for the humiliation of the Christian God, are also praying to the Christian God.

In just nine words, Rev. Conrad has demonstrated he doesn’t know bupkiss about what I would presume is his primary area of expertise: God.

that his opponent [i.e. Obama] wins, for a variety of reasons.

None of which we need to discuss, apparently.

And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation,

Again with the hectoring. Here he sounds like the father of a teenage daughter on Prom night.

because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you. If that happens.

It’s a four-way deity-on-deity smackdown! Because religion is like a pro wrestling match played out by proxy through presidential elections.

So I pray that you would step forward and honor your own name in all that happens between now and election day.

Because God the Almighty, omnipotent and omnipresent, sole creator of the entire Universe, needs a little poke from the right hon. Rev. Conrad every now and then, or his reputation is gonna go to shit.

Some of my lefty friends object to Rev. Conrad’s convocation on grounds that it invokes hate speech. To which I reply: whatever. Sometime in the 1980s “liberals” ceded the topic of religion to “conservatives,” presumably because lefties spend less time in church. Our implicit assumption is that, because the other guys spend so much time talking about God, they must know a lot about Him. To which I would offer: maybe they just don’t know what they’re saying. With twenty minutes on Wikipedia, I can demonstrate more insight into God than Rev. Conrad, and that’s his f-ing job.

The fetus grows toward soulhood. It began in the land of the unliving, of elements, of formless matter and energy. It was not one thing, it was many things. It had no spirit and no soul.

The fetus spirit moves into the land of plants and dreams: unconscious, potential, dark and unthinking. It grows larger, it moves, “it” becomes “he,” he flutters, he wiggles, he hiccups. He inverts, his eyes open, he hears murmurs of voices and heartbeats. He wants to be born, he makes himself be born. He comes out of the between-world, the womb, the world of unthinking life of the sea, the world of life between dead things and sentient things. He is coming into our world now, the world of action and form and spirit.

Spirit is the gift of all living things, however low. Spirit is the will to animate, to thrive, to reproduce, to sicken, to die. Spirit is the blessing and curse of life. To be born is to die, and between those two is a constant state of Impermanence.

You cannot remember your birth, you cannot remember your first words, you cannot remember the world of unconnected sensations, of thoughts without forms and structures. My son lives in that world now. The world of insects, of small things that want light, warmth, food, sleep, comfort. Ahead of him is the growth of his soul.

Soul is the gift of sentient beings. We take our souls from God when we structure the world for ourselves, when we say: “here is the boundary between myself and all other things.” To have a soul means to know what it is to be unique, and to know that you will die. This the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; as long as we draw that boundary we eat that fruit.

Some souls are big and some are small. An adult human, armed with words and math and art and religion and science, has a huge soul that can change the rest of the universe. To shoot an arrow is to strike something with an arrow, that is the Law of Consequence, a law of nature like the second law of thermodynamics. To act without consideration of consequence is soulless.

If animals have souls, they are tiny souls with small aspirations and abilities. Right now my dog has a bigger soul than my son, but that situation won’t persist very long. Maybe other animals have souls like humans, animals like dolphins or chimpanzees or parrots. They have to think about souls in their own way, if they can. I think that all humans have a soul, but it wasn’t given to us in any one instant, we stole it in little pieces from God, we are always stealing more of our soul from God. To Live in Grace is to sometimes, voluntarily, give a little of it back.

“God” is the word we use when we try to understand the soul. We have written about God for three thousand years and we talked about God for tens of thousands of years before that. The Old Sage said “don’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon.” The Prophet said “the human mind cannot comprehend God.” I used to read a lot about God, but you can’t learn to plow by reading books. I think words are suspect. Human beings said every word ever. I think everyone ever, including myself, has misunderstood the nature of God. I think the most definitive thing you can say about God is: if someone tells you about the nature of God, whatever they say is wrong.

Science is a tool for understanding how wrong you are, that’s why science says so little about God.

I call myself a spiritual atheist, does anyone else do this?