Demons, Haunting Us

FAITH HEALERS never perform miracles of faith in hospitals. Or, if they do, they don't do it often, never on camera, never in well publicized well documented conditions, and only under highly secretive, controlled arrangements. Hospitals house sincerely sick people, people who perhaps might not have sufficient faith to motivate god to heal them. I have not been a hospital patient since December, 1964, when I was nine and a half, etherized on a table as the poem goes, and had my tonsils out. In the intervening fifty five years, I've visited hospitals only on specific visitation missions of mercy. I recall my friend being beaten up by a bouncer, driving him to the hospital, and going to the nurse's desk to say howdy to my head nurse mom at three A.M. She was surprised, but glad to see me, whole. When my mom was fallen on by another lady in a tai chi class and went in for a broken leg, I drove halfway across the country and surprised her. Heavily sedated, she was again glad to see me. When my girlfriend was in, I strolled across the hall to the newborn babe room, stood and adored the twenty five tiny pink and blue tykes, when a young lady in a bathrobe walked up. I picked one out, pointed to it, and mentioned that I thought it was the cutest of the lot. The lady started beaming, and told me that I was pointing at hers. Maybe I should have been a faith healer or psychic. If I'm ever in a ditch, I hope she drives by, with her forty years old child. I've had fun in hospitals, but never saw a faith healer roaming the halls, looking to help. Shouldn't they be? We further notice that self proclaimed psychics never seem to win lotteries, nor make it big, Buffett style, in the stock market. And yet, they charge all kinds of prices for their future reading. We live in, as Carl Sagan said, a demon haunted world. His book by that title is a good argument why science works, and nothing else does. Among the demons are superstition, fear, and faith. Credulity and gullibility are others. Taking the time to elicit truth from what little we, with our weak and transitory understanding, as Einstein described it, can comprehend of reality, requires hard, rigorous, painstaking effort, a lot of time and frustration. As Goethe said: "God gave us the acorns, but he will not crack them for us." Thus left to our own devices, we are inclined to take the easy way out. Faith replaces reason and empiricism, and crazy religions (all religions are crazy) spring up all over the world, become popular, and take control of culture. Faith comes more easily and quickly than the assiduous, arduous attention to detail required to glean truth from the world. God tells us everything we need to know in a book. Why not? We arrive at the twenty first century, faith and reason still battling it out, in a war that should have resulted in a unanimous decision for reason long ago, but still hasn't. Faith, superstition, and nonsense are too alluring to let go, like intoxicants. Of course we can use our minds to heal our bodies. Of course the universe was created, if for no other reason than that it exists. But why not actually find out how, rather than inventing how? If only we could be content to live in ignorance a little longer, while we keep digging through haystacks for needles. But we are too arrogant, too impatient, and we must invent an anthropomorphic deity in the sky, who writes the book of truth, and, according to that book, peaks through pin prick holes, which we call "stars" in the dome to look at us. We feel the need for a savior, so we turn someone into one. We don't know one millionth of one percent of anything, Einstein said. Einstein also said "My religiosity consists in humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit which reveals itself in what little we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. I cannot conceive of a personal god who would sit in judgment over creatures of his own creation. Morality is of the highest importance, for mankind, but not for god." Einstein, you see, was willing to admit his ignorance, willing to do the heavy lifting, and willing to linger in ignorance until he actually found out what is going on here, which really, like the rest of us, he never did. But at least he didn't run to faith, invent a world which comforted him out of thin air, and believe whatever he wanted to believe, because its easier that way.