Thoughts on St. Anselm
I am the atheist in the choir. Not sure why the Padre lets me sing. Maybe he has a sense of humor. Maybe he just likes me. Sometimes, the Padre likes to argue about the existence of God. I think he thinks we are engaged in some type of Scholastic debate: I play ―antithesis,‖ he plays ―thesis‖ and together we‘ll come to a ―synthesis.‖ Our arguments always assume some variation in which I accuse him of abusing the principles of Occam‘s Razor and anthropocentricity, of obfuscation and evasiveness, of preying on the gullible, of Jesuit casuistry. He will counter with some stock pointers that the faithful have amassed over the centuries. Then we will plumb the depths of theodicy, weigh in on ―Pascal‘s Wager,‖ and discuss self-referential paradoxes, the limits of knowledge, whether right and wrong are merely social constructs. We may appear like two bald men fighting over a comb, because we know we cannot prove the other wrong. But it‘s really not about that. It‘s personal. It‘s the way the Padre looks at me: full of patronizing sorrow for my spiritual darkness, the crooked timber of my being, which makes me want to rip the shitty, little fraud right out of his heart, hear him howl: ―Yes, I know it‘s not true. I‘ve been living a lie.‖ And so we shadow each other, in some pantomime dance, too afraid to concede, not because it would mean the annihilation of our identities, or the scourging of our pride, but because the dance would be over.