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Debating The Year of Living Biblically

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from: A.J. Jacobs
to: Matt Labash

Exercising the God Muscle

Posted Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, at 3:42 PM ET

Guardian Labash,

Since you doubt me, let me get down on my knees and testify again: I am an agnostic. I am a reverent agnostic with a sense of awe, but an agnostic nonetheless.

And since you brought it up, you should know we agnostics are already planning our very own megachurch. Join us! The bumpers of the cars in our parking lot will bear little silver question marks, and stained glass windows will depict our founder, T.H. Huxley, the great evolutionary thinker who coined the term agnostic. (He died of a heart attack in 1895, midway through a defense of agnosticism. He's the closest thing we have to a martyr.) Our evening prayers will begin: "The lord giveth and the lord taketh away, assuming he existeth in the first place, which he may or may not."

My year of living biblically was intense, spiritually speaking. And it took me through a whole pu-pu platter of beliefs. Sometimes, I stayed with my agnosticism. Occasionally, after reading, say, the red heifer passages in Numbers, I veered into hard-core atheism.

Other times, I was a believer in some sort of vague, God-like force. The God of Spinoza. Or the God of the Jedi knights.

But there were many days during my year, especially after some good, hard praying, that I believed in a God who loves everyone, even Carlos Mencia. A God who created the world for a purpose.

But as I stopped praying all the time, my belief faded. Blame cognitive dissonance or the lack thereof. I wasn't exercising my God muscle, and it shriveled.

You say that to have faith, you have to leap from the cliff. But what if I like standing on the edge of the cliff? Have you seen the view? It's amazing. The leaping part scares me. Who knows where you'll land if you leap? You might fly right past the Judeo-Christian mainstream and end up picketing gay pride parades or having Shabbat dinner with Shmuley Boteach and Uri Geller.

I've searched my heart, even during serious in-flight turbulence, and I haven't found any god-shaped hole there. During my year, I found a ritual-shaped hole. A community-shaped hole. But I don't know about the one shaped like God.

Let me end by saying that I've loved our interfaith wrestling match. God, if he exists, has given you, Matt Labash, both an amazing gift of writing and a mildly disturbing Angie Harmon fetish.

I also appreciate your strong feelings about the Teletubbies. Which—and I might be reading into this—are perhaps too strong? Just for the record, if you decided to ditch your Angie Harmon fetish for some hot Tinky Winky action, I would still love you, and, hopefully, so would God. If he exists.

A.J.

dialogues
entries
123456
from: A.J. Jacobs
to: Matt Labash

Exercising the God Muscle

Posted Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, at 3:42 PM ET
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A.J. Jacobs is the editor at large of Esquire and the author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Matt Labash is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard.
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Remarks from the Fray

The pressure of crafting a universal message to resonate through: why does everyone presume that this is the goal in the scriptures, particularly the OT?

Or more to the point, why presume that Anna Karenina doesn't resonate just because it has characters firmly planted in 1800's Russia, who have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, etc.? Would it be a stronger book if they were all disembodied archetypes? Could you really reduce it to a 'universal message' without a plot and characters concretely framed in relationships and culture, without losing the bulk of the book?

Why should the Testaments be any different? Why should they be some abstract message about love, peace and humanity that is the 'real point' of the whole thing, the rest of which is basically disposable?

--BenK

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(10/17)