A Little Rhyming Philosophy

with apologies to Jonathan Swift and Augustus De Morgan

Oh, the Irony! Atheists Provide the Best Evidence that God is Real!

Seeking a more logical cosmology.

I've been involved in a lot of discussions lately about the existence of God or, conversely, the folly of faith. Mostly these have been fairly civil dialogues on Soul Pancake or The Great Silent Majority page on Facebook. I recommend either or both to your attention if you think it's fun to think and write about life's great questions with people who are willing to listen politely, even to those they consider to be idiots. I've distilled much of what I've posted elsewhere into this little treatise on why I believe in God and why I do not think this is lunacy.

Atheists like to assert that there is no evidence to support the existence of God. Believers then are held to be an ignorant and superstitious lot who need religion as a crutch to face the crushing realities of a meaningless existence. Or, as comedian, Bill Maher, quipped:

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do.

Maher is a funny person and a bonafide wit, but he has no more philosophical leg to stand on here than Dr. Stephen Hawking who has suggested that the laws of nature prove that there is no God. According to Hawking the universe 'popped' into existence, in accordance with the rules of quantum physics, as an 'infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense' proton—so small and so dense that it could not admit time. There was therefore no time for a creator to have acted, and, indeed, no need of a creator except to explain all these things before we had quantum physics to take over the task.

For Hawking, Maher, and all the rest whose understanding of our existence is rooted in the physical sciences, God is a construct. They believe that men invented gods to explain the mysteries of the universe. Presumably they believe that, in modern times, Yawheh, Allah, and the Father of Jesus, all the same God, are just more complex and fully realized versions of the same superstitious hokum.

The Big Bang is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the universe without God, and its proponents have made good on its promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical construct was made without any reference to God. When it comes to accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required even though those who advance the theory would probably deny it.

On the other hand, be He construct or reality, God has always required faith. The faithful already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate. There is no conclusive proof of the existence of God. I will submit that there is a lot of evidence, but there is no proof. I'm talking about objective, scientific proof—the kind that can be tested and verified by repeatable experimentation. There will always be some theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in futility. It is stupid. The Bible does not prove that God exists with any authority except to those who already accept it. This won't work to bridge the chasm between objective reality and the metaphysical plane. For that we need faith.

Faith is bigger than certainty,
but it may still require
heavy equipment.

For the intelligent believer, faith must necessarily contain an element of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge does not even build churches. Certain knowledge is not spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by proof, it is required to keep looking.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility, that he might be wrong.

As I've already said, atheists believe that God, or the gods, are a construct of the human imagination designed to explain the mysteries of the universe. I believe that this human ability to conceive of a creator god is the best evidence we have that one actually exists. Here's why.

If you subscribe to Stephen Hawking's idea of the Big Bang—that a prototypical, protean proton 'popped' into existence and exploded, and that all of the untold trillions of selective events that happened between then and now, leading to our current state of evolution and development, were completely natural and godless and random, then what in our experience of this process would lead us to conceive of a creator cause?

Someone once said, 'all art is derivative.' (I've been trying for several days now to find out just who said it first, but it's all over the internet without any attribution. If anyone knows who said this first, please let me know.) What this means is that, even in the arts - presumably mankind's most creative endeavors - nothing is truly original. Everything is built on something that went before. I submit that this is true of everything that men do.

There is nothing man has accomplished that is not rooted in something else that already existed. To be sure there are materials that exist today that did not exist at the dawn of time, but every one of them is comprised of stuff that did. There are concepts and designs and theories that seem new and wondrous, but all of them are derived from and built on the foundations of the past. Even at the height of its power, humanity is not capable of producing anything from nothing. Everything humanity has done is derivative. Science does not beget; it discovers. Or, as Ecclesiastes has it:

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Beatific vision or
atmospheric pollutants?

If we are nothing more than the sum total of all the random electro-chemical responses that have flowed into our genetic makeup, how did any of us come to conceive of a creator at all? If there is no God then there could be nothing in our naturally-selected history upon which we could begin to assemble this concept. If God doesn't exist, we couldn't possibly have made Him up. What I think instead - no, what I choose to believe - is that we are predisposed to believe in God because we were imbued with a spark of divinity by the creator.

I believe this because it has been given to me to do so. I am not a fool, and I am not insane. I know full well that I had to make a choice to get to this state—a choice that is not supported by any objective, scientific logic, but one that nevertheless makes perfect sense to me.

There is a word in ancient Hebrew, 'ruach.' It is usually translated as breath or spirit. We first encounter it in the Genesis account of creation. I am not offering this as any kind of proof. I am offering it as an explanation as to why I believe what I believe. I am not getting into an argument of Genesis vs. evolution. I believe in evolution, and I accept science, as far as it goes, as demonstrably true. I also believe Genesis—not as a literal account of creation, but as a lovely, poetic allegory for the metaphysical reality of man's place in it.

There are famously two accounts of creation in Genesis. They are different from one another, our first clue that the Bible, even for believers, is not meant to be taken literally. As to the origins of man, the thing I mean to consider here, Genesis 1:27 says, 'God created man in His image, in the divine image He created him, male and female He created them.' In Genesis 2:7 it says, 'the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.'

These two accounts are different, but they are meant to be taken together. They are two different ways of looking at the same thing. The Aramaic word for 'breath of life' in chapter 2 is 'ruach.' Its parallel in chapter 1 is 'the divine image.' God breathed His divine self-image into mankind, male and female, and made of us something entirely new. This is the only reason I can fathom that we are even able to conceive of things beyond our knowing.

Pondering imponderables.

Were it not for this ruach, we would not be able to ponder infinity. We would not be able to embrace divinity. We would not be able to approach holiness. We would instead be imprisoned by our mere chemistry. Without the breath of divine life we would be incapable of bridging the gap between the physical and the metaphysical. We would be the pinnacle of mammalian existence, but we would be incapable of imagining anything else.

This for me is the best evidence that God exists. It doesn't have to be in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. Virtually every religious tradition has its own creation narrative, and they all presuppose some sort of relationship between mankind and the divine. My point is that, no matter the faith tradition, somewhere, somehow God has enabled us to know something of Him, and had He not done so, had He not intervened in our evolution, we would not be able to think Him up on our own. Of course I rely on my faith to tell me this...so I could be wrong.

THE UNEXAMINED LIFE

Temptation to resist...or a little gift from a benevolent God?

The unexamined life may not be worth living, as Socrates suggested, but it sure is easier than second guessing your every motivation. Maybe it's not exactly what Socrates had in mind, but for the dutiful Catholic a regular examination of conscience is part of the defining regimen. It's something we do before we go to confession. This means a thorough scrutiny of the things we have done that we shouldn't have and the things we didn't do that we should have, as well as the reasons we did or didn't do them. As you can imagine there is enormous potential for inner conflict in this process.

The first problem is deciding what's right and what's wrong. We don't actually get to decide this, of course, although many of us are hard pressed to refrain. We may start by going through the 10 commandments, which seem pretty straightforward, but we soon realize that there are degrees of everything and the more we think about it the harder it is to lay down a distinct line between what we need to confess and what's not so bad after all. To make matters more difficult we have to go confess the bad stuff to a priest, often a priest who knows our mother.

This is a hard place to be. This is the garden where the Serpent resides and tries to persuade us that we are the best judges of our own behavior. He goads us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He seduces us with the notion that we are as good as God when it comes to deciding what's sinful and what's not. It's an easy job for the Serpent, not least because it's sometimes hard to decipher exactly what God means.

What exactly is coveting for example? Say you admire your neighbor's wife because she looks like Kate Beckinsale and cooks like Paula Dean. One, who could resist such a creature, and two, when does that stop being mere admiration and start being sinful? To complicate matters, suppose your neighbor is a derivatives trader for Goldman Sachs, an insufferable blowhard, and a philandering dog? When does thinking his Aston Martin ought to be in your driveway instead of a 9 year old PT Cruiser cross the border from longing for social justice into rank covetousness?

And how about the eighth commandment? 'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.' We are told this means you're not allowed to tell lies. What does bearing false witness have to do with the untruths we tell to grease the skids of social discourse? If your husband wants to know if his snoring is an irritant, how charitable is it to say the truth that if it were any worse you would murder him in his sleep? When your six-year-old wants to know why Santa brought him underpants instead of the Freddie Kruger action figure he asked for, do you lie and tell him he should have been a better kid or tell him the truth that Santa doesn't really exist and the crappy gifts are actually from his mother?

I think you get the idea. A good examination of conscience is a tricky endeavor, fraught with moral peril. You have to know what God thinks, even though a lot of what He's said sounds like a 17^th century English poet who's been drinking wine all day. Plus, if the nuns and your catechism are to be believed, He actually left a lot of stuff out of the commandments. So for instance, where it says 'Though shalt not kill,' it seems pretty direct and easy to understand, but we are taught that this also means you can't punch your brother for sticking his tongue out at you in the backseat of your dad's car, or you can't slap your kid for punching his brother, or you can't get angry with your wife for maxing out the Mastercard on the wedding reception for your daughter, who is marrying a vampire wannabee.

We all understand 'Thou shalt not commit adultery', but there are hundreds of ways to be unfaithful to your spouse and the institution of marriage without actually knocking boots in secret trysts. So how do you decide when taking your car to a sorority bikini car wash is less about keeping you car clean and more about chatting up some coeds to see if you've still got some mojo left? Where exactly does wishful thinking become an affront to your vows?

Once you've got a good grasp on your sins, you have to then cultivate a 'firm purpose of amendment'. This means sincere determination not to commit the same sins again. This too is much easier said than done, especially when you consider that most of your so-called sins happened by accident. You resolve to do better. You go to great lengths to avoid situations where you are likely to be tempted. You pray for strength. Then one day you are at the farmers' market looking at the honey crisp apples when a gust of wind lifts the silk skirt of the woman standing next to you to reveal lacy yellow boy-short panties and legs that extend beyond your wildest imaginings. It's difficult at this point to know whether to complain to God that He has led you into temptation in spite of your prayers to the contrary, or to thank Him for the fortuitous view of some of the pinnacles of His creation.

Bean, the contemplative

My dog, Bean, conducts regular self-examinations as well, even though, technically, he is not a Catholic. Admittedly, his focus seems to be more proctological than spiritual, and he does not seem to differentiate much between enthusiastic self-examination and probing the southern-most regions of any other dog that comes within range. Bean has not eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Neither did any of his ancestors. He remains blissful in his ignorance of any arbitrary borders between the proper and the proscribed.

For all his wonderful qualities, Bean is incapable of looking gleefully forward to an opportunity to do something that he knows he shouldn't while praying at the same time, and fervently, for the strength to resist the temptation. We humans can, and, because we can, we do. It's this kind of conflictedness that makes the smelter in which our humanity is fired, repeatedly, until we are sufficiently purified to stand before our Creator and admit to being worse creatures than our dogs.

Steven Hawking Shouldn't Quit His Day Job

I watched the inaugural episode of Discovery Channel's new series, Curiosity, the other week. (Sunday August 7, 2011) In it Dr. Steven Hawking, noted theoretical physicist, postulated that the immutable laws of nature 'prove' that there is no God. I do not doubt that Hawking is a brilliant man who has contributed vast new insights in the fields of physics and cosmology, but, after watching this show, I have to conclude that he has left a lot of air in these particular postulations, and most of that air is hot.

I can't help but think that the show itself was designed to advance the notion that gods in general, and the modern concept of one, true creator God in particular, are mere fanciful concepts of ignorant people rooted in superstition and prejudice. Fully half the show was given over to demonstrating that the ancient Norse gods were invented to explain natural phenomena like solar eclipses, and that the Christian Church of Rome spent centuries frustrating the advancement of science by branding luminaries like Galileo as heretical.

While these are indisputable historical facts, presenting them in this way in this particular show did nothing to advance Hawking's cosmology, but rather served to to cast that cosmology in a light of courageous departure from conventional thinking that was likely to embroil him in controversy. And so it has, not because Hawking has advanced cosmological thinking to new frontiers, but because he has made some leaps of faith in science that would make a televangelist blush.

Hawking seems to relish the role he has scripted for himself. He claims, for instance, that when he attended a Vatican conference on cosmology in 1985 Pope John Paul II admonished the attendees not to 'ask questions about the origins of the universe because that is the work of God'. Hawking has made this claim several times before, but it turns out not to be true. The complete text of the Pope's remarks at that conference and the preceding one in 1981 contain no explicit proscription against investigating the origins of the universe. In fact he seems to welcome such inquiries on the premise that such knowledge advances our understanding of our place in the universe.

To be fair, the Pope does warn against undertaking such queries using the physical sciences alone. He asserts that such investigations without benefit of the metaphysical disciplines would be perforce limited in their usefulness. He does not forbid questions of origin, however, and he certainly does not threaten the kind of 'trouble' that Hawking intimates he will get into for undertaking to answer these questions anyway. Hawking's posturing as a scientist victimized by religious prejudice is little more than self-serving bunkum. It is Hawking's slipshod logical progression that is his undoing, not any fundamental Christian bigotry.

Notwithstanding, I am sure there is plenty of religious bigotry to go around. A lot of it has already surfaced on the Internet in response to Hawking's claims on the show. A lot of it is just as riddled with ignorance and superstition as Hawking says, although, again to be fair, so are the in-your-face celebrations of fundamental atheists worshipping at the altar of Hawking's so-called proofs. As Albert Einstein once quipped, 'The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer'.

Hawking's points are summarized below. Except where noted, these are direct quotes from the show, taken in the order in which they were presented. Brackets indicate paraphrasing by me.

1. The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws, laws that can be understood by the human mind.
2. The discovery of these laws is humankind's greatest achievement...for it is these laws of nature, as we now call them, that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all.
3. Physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal.
4. If you accept...that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask what role is there for God.
5. To make a universe you need only three ingredients: matter, energy, and space.
6. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.
7. [Because, as Einstein discovered, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, mass and energy are essentially the same thing, so you really only need energy and space to make a universe.]
8. Space and energy were spontaneously created in an event we now call the Big Bang.
9. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called negative energy.
10. When the Big Bang produced a vast amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. [The positive and negative energy in the universe always add up to zero.]
11. If the universe adds up to nothing, then you don't need a god to create it.
12. [At the sub-atomic level] you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible. That's because at this scale particles such as protons behave according to the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics, and they really can appear at random, stick around, and then vanish again to reappear somewhere else. Since we know the universe itself was once very small—smaller than a proton in fact—this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the laws of nature.
13. The laws of nature themselves tell us that, not only could the universe have popped into existence like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that nothing caused the Big Bang.
14. At the instant of the Big Bang time itself began...because inside [a] black hole...time doesn't exist. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the universe. The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is...the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.
15. As we travel back in time toward the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it finally gets to a point where the whole universe is in a space so small that it is in effect a single,  infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And, just as with modern day black holes floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that, here too, time itself must come to a stop.
16. You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no 'before the Big Bang'. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. [So] there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed.
17. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything.

What Hawking has attempted is to explain how the universe could have come about without a creator. This much he seems to have done, at least to his own satisfaction and that of the giddy atheists who were waiting for a brilliant cosmologist to tell them they don't have to worry about judgment in a nonexistent afterlife. That is, he has succeeded if you accept that a theoretical prototypical black hole with no existing matter or energy from which to draw would behave in the same way as a proton, which can pop into existence willy-nilly in the midst of a whole universe of preexisting stuff. Personally, I think this is a leap of faith.

Beyond that is Hawking's short-shrift treatment of the laws of nature upon which he rests his case. Where did they come from? He doesn't say. I suppose you could argue that when the universe exploded onto the scene it came complete with the laws that would govern its dynamics and processes. All the matter and all the energy contained therein would just behave according to their natures, and these natures would, in essence, constitute the rules of behavior. I find this a little problematic, but then I am not a theoretical physicist. I am an unemployed accountant. What the hell do I know?

So here is my question for Dr. Hawking. If the Big Bang initially produced a single, infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense proton, which is essentially the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, complete with its own rules for being and acting, what did that hydrogen nucleus fuse with to create helium? How did helium then know how to behave? Where did gold come from? And rabbit fur, and patent leather, and Donald Trump's hair?

Ostensibly all of these things proceeded organically one from the other over billions of millennia until we end up with this immense complexity of matter and energy all behaving according to immutable laws of nature for which we have no source. How is this a more simple explanation than a creator god?

And that's another thing: the creator god, or God. Hawking asserts there couldn't have been one because there was no time for one to have acted. This is the limitation of physical sciences about which John Paul II tried to warn us. If physical science can't observe time before the Big Bang, then it must not have existed. But what if it existed someplace else? Like, for instance, a place where the prototypical proton existed before it appeared here?

Physical science also apparently requires its creator god, if in fact it can conceive of such a thing at all, to have mass and to occupy space and time. Hawking says there was no time for God to have acted. The metaphysical notion of God does not have these limitations. In fact, most of us who believe in God believe that he emphatically does not exist in time or space, nor does he have any mass. We have convenient metaphorical expressions to explain God's presence and attributes, but on the conceptual plane we think of God as timeless intellect, pure spirit, an overarching ideal containing the essential nature, the rules if you will, of everything we are able to observe and experience.

This is ancient stuff. God's own name for himself in the ancient Hebraic texts is 'I am'. He is not before or after creation. He just is. Always. This is not an observable kind of thing. This is therefore not something that can be proven or dis-proven with science. You can call bullshit if you want, and many have, but that doesn't make it so.

Hawking makes a lot out of our 'need', or more specifically the lack thereof, for a creator. His idea of God is of a construct invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable. Accordingly, as we are able to explain more and more of our physical universe, we need God less and less. Science has its own artificial constructs though. Black holes and the Big Bang are two such. They are theoretical events that were invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable.

The Big Bang especially is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the universe without God, and Hawking has made good on its promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical construct was constructed without any reference to God. When it comes to accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required.

God on the other hand, construct or reality, has always required faith. The faithful already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate. There will always be some theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in futility. It is stupid.

For the intelligent believer though, faith must necessarily contain an element of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge is not spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by proof, it is required to keep looking.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility, that he might be wrong. I don't think this notion has entered Stephen Hawking's mind. As a man of faith I have to grant that he may be right, but I don't believe it for a minute.

Day 13 - The Joy of Surgery

You might feel a little pinch.

          I have 14 kidney stones. Some of them are quite large. The biggest one is about 5/8 of an inch in length and a quarter inch across. That is a huge piece of gravel when you consider where it has to come out. I’ve passed kidney stones before, and I can attest that doing so will make a dancer out of the stodgiest and least rhythmic of old men. My urologist has scheduled a lithotripsy to start breaking them up. He thinks it will take at least two procedures and maybe as many as four to get them all. Modern lithotripsy is a wonderful thing. They use focused sound waves to crack the stones. The doctor doing the procedure can watch the whole thing on a video screen and see how he’s doing in real time. They put you to sleep to keep you from jumping every time they zap you, but there’s no cutting. That’s the best part. I don’t like cutting.

          Cutting was featured last year when I had cancer…and then I didn’t. This is a good story for two reasons. First, at the end I’m still alive…so far anyway. Second, it illustrates why I think that Fritz is very likely a jerk.

I went for a routine colonoscopy at the end of July in 2007. I tell people that I like a colonoscopy. No one wants to believe it, but it’s true. While bits of a colonoscopy are certainly unpleasant, especially the prep the day before, I really don’t mind them. I’ve had several. They give you good drugs, they knock you out for the actual procedure, and when it’s over you get the rest of the day off even though you don’t feel bad at all. What’s not to like? I especially like them now that one has probably saved my life.

I woke up in the recovery room after this particular colonoscopy. My wife was there making sure that I remembered to breathe because for some reason I don’t find breathing all that compulsory when I wake up from general anesthesia. Also it seems I like to profess a profound and abiding affection for the nursing staff while the anesthetic is wearing off, and my wife likes to stay close to keep me from either succeeding too well at fascinating the nurses or making a fool of myself. Anyway we were thus engaged, me waking up, my wife encouraging me to breathe and stifling my other natural inclinations when the doctor came in to the room.

“Well, you have cancer,” he said, just like that, no ‘good news—bad news’ preamble, no greasing the skids, no easing the shock.

Of course I was still stoned, so the gravity of what the doctor had said really didn’t register on me. My mind was busy processing other information such as: did that gasp I just heard from my wife suck all the oxygen out of the room? And couldn’t you have sent a nurse to tell me that—say the curvy little one with the dark hair and the big eyes I just saw pushing the IV pole down the hall?

In case we were still conscious after hearing this momentous news, the doctor also brought pictures he had taken of the inside of my colon. One of them featured a protuberance with an angry looking mass on a stalk. It was quite impressive. Not the kind of thing you’d like to meet in dark alley or a Quentin Tarantino movie.

“I took a sample,” the doctor said. “We’ll send it out to the lab to confirm, but I’ve seen a lot of these. It’s cancer.”

As it turned out, he was right. The lab confirmed cancer. I got hooked up with a colorectal surgeon, and we scheduled a bowel section to remove 14 inches of southbound pipe. I suppose there’s no scarier thing you can hear from your doctor than ‘you’ve got cancer.’ I only suppose this because it seems reasonable, but the fact is that I never got scared. I got mad. I got mad as hell, but I was never really scared. I think the reason for this is that my job already sucked so much that the prospect of a terminal illness represented something like a reprieve from having to go to work. At the very least I was going to get some time off, or so I thought.

I suppose the degree to which I got angry merits some comment because who I got mad at was God, and when you have a serious disease that might kill you like cancer the usual course is to start sucking up to God in order to cut a deal. ‘Oh Lord if only you take this cancer away I promise I will go to church faithfully every Sunday, be generous when they pass the collection basket, and never ever hit on another nurse as long as I live.’ That kind of thing. My problem, the thing that made me mad, had to do with the Scripture reading and the sermon that went along with it from the Sunday before I got the troubling news about my colon.

You may know the scripture. I know I’ve heard it many times before. It is from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 11, verses 11-13: ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’

I listened and took these verses to heart. I prayed earnestly for a boon from my Father in heaven. I prayed to be delivered from my job. Really I did. That was my fish, the thing I wanted, the gift I needed, the proof that I was loved. ‘Oh, Lord, please get me the hell out of here. Give me something else to do. I’ll take less money. I’ll take a smaller office, harder work, grittier conditions. Just please don’t make me do this any longer.’ Instead I got cancer—a snake, a scorpion, a crumby deal. I was pissed, and I stayed pissed for weeks.

Then an amazing thing happened. Maybe I was just tired of being angry all the time. It takes a lot out of you—staying mad. It wears you down. You lose your edge, your focus. You begin to be open to kinder, gentler thoughts just because it gives you a break from the bile in your stomach. What happened is that it began to sink in that I could actually die, and that if I did then technically my prayers would have been answered. God just might be getting me out of that job by calling me home. When I realized that, I actually began to feel a little thankful. God does answer prayers, but frequently not in the ways that we think he should. When the day of the surgery finally arrived several weeks later I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it, and I was pretty okay with that. The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t He?

So I woke up in the recovery room, and I was thirsty as hell. The nurse was busy trying to make me comfortable. My wife wasn’t there because the surgeon forgot to go tell her that I’d lived. It was just the nurse and me and the sweet freedom to become the fool I ached to be. I asked her for some water. She said I couldn’t have any. I asked her for some ice chips to suck on. She said I couldn’t have any. I told her I just needed some relief. I wasn’t going to rat her out. I promised to love her forever if she would bring me some ice chips anyway. She brought me a whole cup of ice chips. She was overwhelmed by my post surgical charms, which it would seem are becoming legendary.

The surgeon finally remembered to stop by to tell us—my wife had found me by that time—that the surgery had been a success and that I was going to live. He had an amazing tale to tell. The surgery went well. He’d taken out the agreed upon 14 inches of colon. He’d checked the lymph nodes. He’d looked all over hell’s creation for some sign of cancer but couldn’t find any. He’d found the marks that other doctor had left during the colonoscopy to indicate where he ought to cut, but he couldn’t find any cancer. He couldn’t find any polyps. He couldn’t find anything to indicate he’d done me any good whatsoever. My wife found a miracle in this. Hundreds of people were praying for me. God had heard their prayers and taken the cancer away. I had to go through the surgery so that the doctor could confirm the miracle for us. It was plain as day.

I found something else in this. I’m not so easily duped by the Almighty. It may well have been miraculous, but the upshot was that I was eventually going to have to go back to work. My prayers had been answered not at all. I was reminded of my own personal favorite scripture—favorite because it is to me the most apropos: ‘Happy the man who delights in the chastisements of the Lord.’ Apparently I had not yet been sufficiently chastised, and, even worse, now I was going to have to answer for the nurse with the ice chips.

All of this brings me back to Fritz. Fritz had replaced Clive the sweetheart shortly after the company was sold to a private equity firm (not Cerberus) out of New York. The new owners were all about efficiency, urgency, and sweeping change. They didn’t approve of sweethearts. There was no room for sensitivity in their modus operandi. They wanted change agents, fiddlers, proactive thinkers outside the box, buzzword chandlers, and jerks. They wanted the kind of managers who occasionally throw out the baby with the bathwater. They fostered the kind of environment where it doesn’t really matter what gets destroyed or lost in the process as long as you are continually moving forward.

Fritz was perfect for them. Fritz is tightly wound. Fritz hums with barely contained energy that sometimes arcs out, sparks and fries things around him. He talks in clipped sentences. When he asks you a question, instead of listening to your answer he is already processing the thing he is going to say next. Fritz thinks that when he has everyone toiling needlessly at urgent tasks, spinning their wheels, arcing and sparking just like him, that he has done a good job of managing. You can imagine Fritz as a sea captain on a clipper ship. The entire crew is up in the rigging, hauling sheets, trimming sails, dodging lightning strikes, hanging on for dear life. Fritz is furiously spinning the wheel, port to starboard, starboard to port, only the wheel is not attached to a rudder. There is no rudder so all of what everyone is doing is for naught. There is a saying carved into the bowsprit. It represents the guiding philosophy of the ship and its master: ‘If it weren’t for our sense of urgency, we wouldn’t have any sense at all.’

At the time of my surgery we were working on the annual budget. Deadlines had been posted. The first pass of the budgets had already been done. That is broad assumptions had been made and translated into expected revenue and cost numbers for the upcoming fiscal year. The second pass—a more refined, more thoroughly vetted version of the first was due two weeks after my surgery. I had already done most of the work. I felt I had a week to recover from the surgery and a week to finish up the budget. That would give me plenty of time to do the few hours work that would be required to submit by the deadline, even if I took a few more days to recover than I thought. To me everything was copacetic.

This didn’t suit Fritz. He started worrying about it while the surgical team was probing my bowels on the operating table. I had the surgery on Friday, and was released from the hospital on Sunday afternoon. I went home with a couple of dozen staples in my abdomen and a bottle of oxycodone caplets to ease my considerable discomfort. Monday morning I got a frantic call from the other Ron, the new corporate accounting manager. Fritz wanted to schedule a conference call to discuss how we were going to get my budget done while I was recuperating.

“It’s not due for two weeks,” I pointed out. “I’ll be back in the office next Monday, and the budget will be submitted by the deadline. No problem.”

“Fritz doesn’t want to wait for the deadline.”

“Then why did he publish one? I mean, come on, Ron. We discussed this at the controllers’ conference. We’ve had conference calls since. We all agreed on the gateways and the deadlines based on what was feasible and what the board of directors expected. Why does he want to change it now?”

“I don’t know. He just wants to be able to massage it for a week or so before he sends it upstream.”

I could tell that Ron was very nervous. Fritz had given him a task. Get the budgets in early. Now he was having trouble getting me on board. I wasn’t being a team player, not being flexible enough, not demonstrating sufficient dedication to the team effort. Oh no, I was lollygagging at home with a belly full of staples and a head full of pain relievers.

“Is tomorrow good for you?” Ron asked.

“I have a doctor appointment in the morning.”

“So how’s the afternoon look?”

“I’m recovering from major surgery, Ron,” I say. “I’ll be right here, in pain, on drugs, forcing fluids, and hoping I don’t get sepsis and die.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll try to set it up for 2:00 p.m.”

The call itself was confusing. This may have had to do with the level of pain medication coursing through my system and short circuiting my synapses, or it may have just been the mind numbing drivel coming out of the phone. It was hard for me to gauge at the time. The conferees included Fritz, the two Rons and myself. I spent some time making my case that the budget would be done in plenty of time, that I had planned for being out, and that the budget was under control.

Fritz however, as New Ron had indicated, was anxious to get something early. To accomplish this he wanted me to get someone else working on massaging the budget while I was out. I didn’t want to do this. The budget is a complicated animal. It resides in a huge interactive spreadsheet. Someone who doesn’t understand where everything is and how everything interacts could easily damage it. It is so complicated that it ranks among those things—we all have them—that are harder to explain than they are to do. Fritz wanted me to tell the new Ron how to do it. I knew that this would be harder than just coming in and doing it myself—even on drugs. I also knew that explaining this to Fritz in such a way that he would believe it would be more difficult still.

I began to think that I would never get off the phone. Fritz was going to keep us talking until he got a resolution that suited him. I only had two outs. I either had to die—interesting don’t you think how many of my problems seem to have an untimely death as a viable solution—or I had to lie. I decided to lie. I told Fritz that I would go over the details of the budget with new Ron and get him accumulating and analyzing expense data. I told him there was no reason for all of us to discuss the detail on a conference call. New Ron and I could do it privately after we all hung up. I told him that this way we could have him the second pass at the beginning of the following week rather than the end. He seemed to be happy to have made things more difficult for all of us, which is after all his own personal gauge on his effectiveness as a manager. That he chose to do it three days after I underwent major surgery makes him, in my book, a monumental jerk.