Midlife Meditation

He certainly likes to show off executive orders. Congratulations, Bill Maher. Your lifelong dream has come true: the United States of America has an atheist President. Of course, Maher, being a principled atheist, will insist that Trump's lack of knowledge of or interest in religion does not make him an atheist. The President is not actively anti-Christian; much to the contrary, he insists his faith credentials are as legitimate as anyone who's occupied the Oval Office. He has to: evangelical Christians are a large part of his base. During the election, he actively courted their votes, reaching out to readers of the Christian Right who, after endorsing him, sought to downplay his obvious discomfort with fundamental Christian values like charity, mercy, and tolerance, not to mention his long record of marital infidelity and sexual assault. He'll get us the Supreme Court, they said, and that means overturning Roe V. Wade, protecting religious homophobia, revivi...

First things first: there are few things I enjoy as much as my weekly dose of Bill Maher. Real Time , Bill Maher's politics/celebrity chat/comedy hour, appears every Friday on HBO. Maher has been playing this game for two decades, putting together panels of pundits, politicians, and celebrities to discuss whatever current events are of interest to him, mingling them with comedy bits, and closing out the hour with a commentary that is always thoughtful, often hilarious, and occasionally moving. When it aired on ABC, the show was called Politically Incorrect. Then Maher took things too far, insisting that the 9/11 terrorists may have been many things, but cowards they were not. Soon after that, he moved to HBO, where he was given much freer rein not just to say unpopular things, but to sprinkle them with four-letter words. There are times when the show devolves into a shouting match, as liberal and conservative voices try to talk over each other, and I find those moments frustrat...

It begins Sunday for Christians, Monday at sunset for Jews. For both faiths, it is the holiest time of the year, the time that defines them as a people chosen by God to witness to the world. Both holy weeks revolve around the life of a reluctant savior, a man empowered by God to deliver others from misery and death. One was a prince who abandoned his royal inheritance to become a shepherd, until God spoke to him in the wilderness and directed him to liberate all his people. The other was a common laborer who, after a pilgrimage in the wilderness, became a shepherd to a small sect of his people, but who, after his death, was exalted by a growing body of followers who called him Prince of Peace. The one died of old age, gazing from a distance at the Promised Land he would never enter; the other died young, executed by an occupying power for his dangerous ideas, which included the teaching that all the earth could become a Promised Land. There I will end my listing of parallels betwe...

I've written thousands of words in this space about things I no longer believe, and why I have lost my faith in them. Ironically, my favorite part of the church service used to be the recitation of the creed. Methodism is not a creedal faith--the church has no official statement of beliefs (don't tell the conservative Good News lobby this unless you're up for a thumping of Biblical proportions)--but most Methodists spend a couple of minutes every Sunday speaking a creed in unison. Because none of them is official, there can be a different one each week. I liked the Apostles' Creed for its conciseness, and because I could say it from memory; and the Creed of the United Church of Canada for its contemporary social justice orientation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, felt like an exercise in dogmatics, which is exactly what it was intended to be from the beginning: a bureaucratic summary of those beliefs deemed essential to Roman Catholicism. For much of the histor...