A Mother's Tale...

Recently I became acquainted with a remarkable woman. She is widowed.. She is a mother of two children, both of whom who have long since left home. She lives in a small home on a relatively large lot, covered in trees and flowers.

Since arriving in the USA with her husband in 1970 she has lived in  a small border town of about six hundred people. She was active in a variety of human rights organization and spearheaded a group that brought "Vietnamese boat people" to the USA. She has written op ed pieces for local, state and national news papers. Danielle never backed down from controversial issues and this didn't always make her popular. She was active in local politics and served for years as Deputy Mayor.

She is the epitome of the "sweet old lady": Refined, polite, somewhat worldly and always with a ready smile and welcome for strangers.

This is her story as I learned it. It is the story of Danielle Raphael, from her birth to in effect her rebirth at the end of World War II. Danielle Raphael is not her married or maiden name. It is the name she adopted while serving in the German Resistance movement and it is one she chooses to use when talking of those "dark days". It is simply too painful for her to speak in the first person about what she experienced as a young woman.

Danielle Raphael was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1923. She was born into a rich, ancient,family who traced its history back to at least the 12th century. Over the centuries her family counted among its numbers famous composers, authors, poets, scoundrels, warriors and court favorites. Her father was a rich and successful merchant who had fought for his country in World War I and who had been decorated for valorous service to the German Fatherland. He was proud of his war record and his family's distinguished genealogy. His brother, Danielle's uncle, had lost his life fighting in the same conflict. Few families were more proudly German than Danielle's.

Growing up, Danielle enjoyed the privileges that come from being born into a wealthy family. There were vacations in the capitals of Eastern Europe. Shopping trips to Paris so she and her sisters and mom could be dressed in the latest continental fashions. Danielle particularly enjoyed the family vacations at beach resorts like Dieppe, on the French side of the English Channel.

She was always athletic and a bit of a dreamer. One of her favorite fantasies was to be the first woman to swim the English Channel. She would swim tirelessly, day after day, in the cold Atlantic waters in preparation for her Channel swim.. During the school year she lived in their downtown, right side of town, Berlin apartment. She attended elite private Christian schools, for the daughters of the wealthy.

By the time Danielle was ten years old dark anti-semitic clouds began casting their shadow over her family and future. But Danielle was mostly sheltered from all of this. She knew little of Hitler or his hatred of Jewish people. In 1933, when Danielle was only ten years old, Adolph Hitler took power in Germany. From now on what had been unofficial became government policy: the systematic harassment of Jewish people.

Her step brother and sister, both university students in Heidelberg, were all too aware of the way doors were being shut in the face of anyone who was a Jew. Scholarships and seats at university were increasingly denied to anyone who was of Jewish descent. They tried to warn their parents of what might be coming and to urge them to move their wealth and family out of Germany.

But Danielle's father would hear nothing of this. He was German. His roots in Germany were too deep to imagine living elsewhere. He would stay. Hitler would not last. The German people were too intelligent and civilized to let such a man bring ruin to his country, he reasoned. Danielle's step brother and sister, like many younger, adventuresome German Jews emigrated to Palestine and became leaders of the emerging Zionist movement that eventually lead to the creation of a Jewish homeland: Israel.

Danielle had another step sister who did not go with her brother and sister to Palestine. She too was a very athletic girl, so much so that she was seen as a favourite in several Olympic swimming events. She trained hard and looked forward to representing her county, in the 1936 Olympics, which that year were being held in Berlin. A few weeks before the Olympics, the German people learned of the tragic accident that robbed this promising athlete of any chance of winning medals. She had, it was reported, a serious fracture of her arm and swimming was not possible. But what was reported in the Goebbel controlled press was not the truth. She had not broken her arm. She was ready and able to compete. But she was under house arrest. Germany did not want a Jewish athlete competing and perhaps winning in there all Aryan Olympics.

Danielle's step sister gave up swimming and dreams of competing in Olympics. She met a young man and got married. Together they decided to leave Germany, forever. They boarded a ship of fellow Jewish emigrants who hoped to start a new life in Canada or the USA. But it turned out that neither of these countries wanted any more Jews in their countries. The countries that were supposed to welcome the "huddled masses" closed their doors to these Jewish people. Sadly anti-semtism was not an exclusive German disease.

Port after port, nation after nation closed their doors and hearts to Danielle's step sister and new husband. One South American port allowed the passengers to get off the ship for a few hours of visiting and spending. The young couple decided to get off and to not come back. They made their way to Uruguay, which had a large German population, some of whom were distant relatives. They never returned to Germany; Danielle never saw them again. She did hear from them that they managed to create a successful life for themselves in their adopted country.The ship they had been on eventually returned to Germany. Most of the passengers were arrested and eventually executed in one of the camps set up the Nazi government to deal with the so called "Jewish problem"..

At about the same time--1937--Danielle's blood brother was sent to Switzerland, to go to school. . Danielle could have gone with him, but she could not bear the thought of leaving her mom or her life in Berlin. Her decision was rooted both in love and ignorance of the danger she was in.

Not much longer, in early 1938, Danielle's father was summoned to appear before some bureaucratic sounding Nazi tribunal that was set up to legally rob Jewish citizens of their private property. He was told his businesses were going to be taken away from him and given to someone who was considered more loyal to the State than a "Jew".

He would also have to leave his beloved Berlin apartment. It was going to be taken over by the Propaganda Ministry under Joseph Goebbels and used as a studio to shoot movies--ironically anti semitic movies! It was too much for Danielle's father to bear. He had not been in good health for many years. He suffered a massive and fatal heart attack.

At fourteen years old Danielle and her mom were forced into a shabby, poorly heated, one bedroom apartment, in a Berlin ghetto. All that they once had was gone. Their worldly wealth consisted of all that could be packed into one small suitcase.

Many Jewish people gave up. Some fled the country. Some tried to forge new identities and tried to pass themselves off as Christians, in other parts of Germany. And many others simply overwhelmed by all that had happened to them committed suicide. But Danielle's mom was made of sterner stuff. She trained to be a nurse and was given work in hospitals put aside for Jewish people. The pay was less than a quarter of what non Jewish nurses received, but it at least enabled her to feed her daughter and to see that she had some clothes to fit her still growing body.

Danielle was fifteen going on sixteen. She had a boy friend, someone she had first met while vacationing in Poland. She was twelve at the time she met him; he was fifteen. He was the first boy she had kissed. They were very close that first summer. So close that her mom even found the time to speak to Danielle about "how girls get pregnant".

Freddy Raphael was his name. He lived only a few blocks from Danielle's former apartment building in Berlin. He too had been born into a life of privilege. He too was a Jew. Before the "bad times" they had gone out together to school dances and on walks to the museums and zoo. They were friends, not lovers.

But, in a world that seemingly had turned its back on them, they increasingly turned to each other for comfort and love. It wasn't long before Danielle discovered she was pregnant. The families agreed that the two should get married and toghether seek exit papers--maybe go to Switizerland or South America. But they had waited too long. In the Fall of 1939, Germany invaded Poland. France and Britain honored their promise to Poland to come to their aid in the event of a German attack. World War II had begun. No one, least of all a Jewish teengage mom and her young  husband was going to be allowed to leave Germany.

With the outbreak of World War II, life got even uglier for Jewish people who now in addition to be hated for being "Christ killers"  were routinely scapegoated as the reason their country was at war with the West.

The young couple was forced to wear a yellow star over their outer clothing and a sign that read JEW. This meant that many of the goods and services we all take for granted were denied them. They both were forced to work grueling 12 hour days, made worse by bus commutes that took hours. They were unable to get fresh fruits or milk for their baby. These and other foods were denied to Jewish people.

If Danielle and her husband managed to get a few hours together, with the baby, they counted themselves lucky. They spent these few hours together in Freddy's mom's home listening to music on the radio, holding hands or reading, but mostly dreaming of what life might be like when, and if Hitler was defeated, and they could go back to the way things once were.

But it wasn't to be.

By early 1942, the forceful deportation of Jewish people to the concentration camps in the East was gaining momentum. Danielle learned children in particular were targeted for deportation to camps in the East. She realized she must get her daughter to safety. Her mother in law and husband were afraid and counseled against it. But Danielle knew there was no choice.

She loved Freddy, but she knew her husband was not a strong man She suspected her husband would if tortured reveal the whereabouts of her daughter. It wasn't an easy decision, but they agreed that they must for the sake of their daughter get a divorce and live a part so he could honestly claim to not know where his daughter could be found. Together they arranged for Freddy to live with another woman. The divorce on grounds of adultery and separation went into effect and Danielle moved into a cramped one room apartment, with her young daughter, Reha.

She arranged through various contacts to give her daughter to a family who lived in another city in Germany. The story would be that the little girl had been orphaned after her parent's apartment had been bombed in an Allied Air Raid. It was, it seemed, a good decision. Her daughter would be safe. She could be raised as a Christian child and hopefully escape the Nazi racial policies.

It hurt, though. It hurt more than anything she had ever experienced before or later. She would always remember the look on her daughter's face as she handed her over to a stranger. She would remember the sound of her daughter screaming for her mother to come for her. She would remember seeing her disappear on a train leaving Berlin. She felt utterly empty and with little will to live.  But at least her daughter would be safe.

She and her former husband got together from time to time. He would not ask about the whereabouts of their daughter and Danielle would not offer any information. They made love when possible, but mostly just hung onto each other for a few stolen moments.

Wanting to fight this inhumane regime they both joined the German resistance movement and because they were in effect secret soldiers they soon found themselves separated with no way of getting in contact with each other. For some time Danielle thought the boy she had first kissed, the father of her child, her former husband, her lover had been killed fighting the Nazis.

She did not think she her fate would be any different than that of Freddie.

In January of 1943 the Gestapo finally caught up with her. For the most part her under ground work was to pose as a young German school girl on vacation. She carried papers that were used by the Allied air force to assess the effectiveness of their bombing raids. They were passed on to agents stationed near Switzerland.  She had no idea what was in the papers she carried. Fortunately, for her the Gestapo officers who arrested her at a station near the Swiss border did not immediately search her. This gave her a chance to get rid of the papers on her by tossing them into a wood stove just outside her cell.

She was threatened. She was badly beaten. She was sexually humiliated.  They wanted to know more about the German Resistance movement. She did not talk. A few days after she had been captured a German policeman, who worked at the place she was being held,  came into her cell and told her he was with the underground and not to worry they were going to get her out.

It all seemed like just one more empty promise. She could not see how escape was possible. Shortly afterwards her Gestapo captors told her they were convinced she was a spy and that the very next morning she was going to be taken out into the courtyard and shot to death. She spent a sleep-less night preparing to die. She thought of her young daughter and how she would grow up never knowing her mom. But she felt some comfort knowing that she was in a good family and had probably already forgotten her mom. She thought of being in the arms of her lover and former husband. She thought of her mom and dad and all the many vacations they had together. She cried a little, but not much. In some ways she was just tired of it all and not really fearful of dying, anymore.

She prayed but this she admitted was more from habit than conviction.

Early the next morning, the door of her cell was thrown open and two very large and menacing men entered her cell. She got up from the cot she had been lying on; she was ready. She was determined that she would die with some measure of dignity. Even though she offered no resistance the two guards seemed to delight in hitting and kicking her. She said nothing: she gave nothing away by sound or gesture to indicate her feelings.  She did not want to give them any joy or comfort at her pain. It wasn't much, but it felt to her like she was standing up to them, just a little.

Once outside, she was told to stand by an old brick wall and was ordered to strip off all of her clothes. Why? Surely her clothes would not stop any bullets. She was wearing prison garb. She had been searched and searched again countless times. There was no way she could have been hiding anything on herself. All she could conclude was that it was intended to sexually humiliate her, to give the firing squads and witnesses something to ogle. Let them she thought. She just didn't care.

As she took off each layer of clothing she felt herself becoming increasingly detached, moving away from a world she had grown weary of. She looked at the glow in the Eastern sky. She heard a few winter birds in the trees. She could hear the sounds of the boots on frozen snow and even the sounds of breathing. Someone asked her about last words or thoughts. She asked for a cigarette. She didn't smoke, but somehow she wanted to have a cigarette, to experience smoking. The cigarette was given to her and had just been lit when the policeman--the double agent from the Resistance Movement--appeared. He had papers from the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. They wanted to question Danielle, further. They wanted to see what she knew about the Berlin chapter of the Resistance Movement.  She was, for now, worth more to them alive than dead. It was a reprieve of sorts.

She was being sent to a prison, just outside of Berlin, for political criminals. It would be a relatively safe place to stay. Far better than any of the camps created to hold Jewish prisoners. Even the very efficient Gestapo was having a hard time processing all of the many "enemies of the State". There was a good chance that if she kept quiet and if the Warder, a friend of sorts, didn't push too hard to have her sent to the Gestapo that she just might in time be forgotten. She could, it was hoped, spend whatever days or months or years were left in the lifetime of the promised Thousand Year Reich, in safety.

She was warned by her policeman guard to be nice to the Warder, to not upset him. What did he mean by that wondered Danielle. She soon found out.

The Warder was as promised a friendly man. He even seemed anxious that Danielle be allowed a bath every few nights, an almost unheard of luxury for prisoners, let alone Jewish prisoners. She soon noticed the peephole in the bathroom wall and the eyes behind the peephole. She knew what she must do in order to survive. She put on a show and ignored the sounds she could clearly hear behind the walls of the peephole.

It might have worked. They might have forgotten about her and if she continued to amuse the Warder, she just might live till the end of the war. But an informant alerted the Gestapo about her and more importantly that she had had a daughter who had disappeared.  She was brought to Berlin for questioning. Questioning meant beatings. She was punched in the face and stomach and kicked in her genitals. Her eyes were swollen shut. Her mouth was bloodied. Her shoulder had been pulled from its socket.  But she did not reveal what had happened to her daughter.

Thinking her mom might know where Danielle's daughter was they arrested and tortured her, as well. But her mom also refused to talk. They could have both been executed on the spot, probably would have been. But it was near the 20th of April, 1943, near the birthday of Hitler. As a present to Hitler 1000 Berlin Jews were gathered up and sent to Birkenau, Auschwutz.. Danielle and her mom were among the 1000 sacrificial human gifts.

They were crammed into a locked, nearly air less rail car. The process of reducing them from humans to something less than human had begun. They slowly made their way to Auschwitz, Poland. Although, at the time she really didn't know where they were going. There were over a hundred people in her rail car. They had one bucket for their waste. It was not enough and soon the bucket was filled to the top. In spite of their pleas when stopped at stations they were not allowed to empty the bucket. Fortunately, there was one man, a giant of a man, in her rail car who was able to kick a small hole in the rail car wall. They were able to dump the contents of the bucket outside. It wasn't much but little acts of defiance like this gave hope to the human spirit.

One night, the last night on the train, while curled up beside her mom, on the rail car floor, Danielle heard the sounds of crying coming from a young man just behind her. She managed to twist around to look at him and to ask him why he was crying. He was no more than sixteen or seventeen years, old at most.Why was he crying she asked? Was it  because he had been separated from a lover? from his mom and dad?

No.

He told her he was crying because he realized he had never known what it was like to kiss or hold a woman and now, maybe, he would never know. Danielle stroked his face and tried to brush away his tears. Thinking of her young husband, she kissed him long and hard on the lips. She cuddled him in her arms and allowed him to touch her. All that long last night on the train she held him till he fell into a troubled sleep. The next morning they arrived at Birkenau. He was not a strong man and she knew, or soon knew, he had been selected for immediate execution. She always felt happy, even proud that she had been able to give this young man at least one night in the arms of a woman.

At the station the men and women were separated, the strong and the weak, the young and the old, those with and not with children. Some went to the left of their respective lines. Left meant immediate death, which was the fate of all children, anyone older than forty years old and the sick. Those who were told to go to the right of the line got to live a few more months before disease and starvation killed them or too weak to work and so chosen for the gas chambers.

Danielle was strong of body and will. She once again determined to live, to tell her story and the stories of all those who no longer could tell their stories. She was also "lucky". Early in her stay she was transferred from hard labor to the sorting compound--strangely this compound was called Canada--where the effects of those sent directly to the death chambers were sorted, classified, labeled and got ready for shipment back to Germany. This work allowed for double rations, plus the odd sweet treat that was found in the clothing of those chosen for execution. But even double rations was half of what an average woman needed in calories each day. The effect of this slow starvation was illness. Illness often meant a one way ticket to the death chamber. If you remained ill for more than a few days you were executed. Sometime Danielle had to exercise all of her will power to pretend to feel better even though her body was wracked with fever and pain.

The days, the weeks, the months went by and she survived in a place where a life span was measured in days not weeks or months let alone years.

Sometime in 1944 she was informed by one of the camp prostitutes who always knew everything that her husband and child had been sent to Birkenau. Danielle by this time was a veteran inmate. She knew how to move from one compound to another and what guards could be bribed by various kinds of favors in order to get around the rules of the camp. She found him and for the first time in nearly two years she was able to hold and kiss her husband.

He told her of how the family she had sent their daughter to had got frightened and gave her up. How he and their daughter had been re united and lived under cover. He told her of how an informant had given away their hiding place and about the horrors of the trip to Auschwitz. Had she seen their daughter, he wondered because an older woman had agreed to take her and to bring her to the woman's camp? Danielle knew by this time that children and whatever women were with them were executed immediately. She knew she would never see her daughter, again. But her former husband did not know this. So she told a lie and said everything was all right.

She tried to tell him how to survive in the camps, what to wear, who to trust and the importance of eating anything at any opportunity--even if this meant digging in the pockets of those who died overnight. To eat insects, weeds, anything.  Those that let scruples or taste get in the way of eating: died. He heard her, but she felt he didn't understand or didn't want to understand what she was saying. She feared for her husband.. She knew that if he didn't adapt quickly to life in the camps, he would not survive.

A few weeks later, Danielle arranged to have a whole evening with her former husband. She paid in the currency of the camp: various goods, favors--best not talked about. She managed to get some candles, some extra food, some alcohol and cigarettes. Most precious of all she and her husband would have time together, alone. There would be time for love making and holding each other. It was only a small storage shed, but it represented so much hope and promise, that even the finest of hotels in the world could not have been more looked forward to..

It was dangerous and if caught they would  both be tortured and then executed--executed slowly and with as much pain and as publically, as possible. But she felt desperate to be in the arms of her lover once more, to tell him what had happened to their daughter; she wanted to give him reasons for hope and the strength to keep fighting. 

When she got to the appointed rendezvous she was met not by her husband, but one of the men in his barracks. He told her how her husband had complained the night before to the wrong guard about having a sore throat. He was immediately selected for execution. She didn't cry; she simply gave the messenger the food, the cigarettes and small flask of brandy. She made her way back to her barracks and when asked why she was back so soon she collapsed.

She was still not yet 21 years old; she had lost her daughter and husband. She had not seen, nor heard from her mom in months. She could only presume the worst and believed her mom had been sent to the death chambers.  She gave up, she said. She lost her will to live and sunk into a deep depression. She did not eat. She was re assigned to heavy labor and short rations always a prelude to being selected for death. She got weaker and weaker. And then one night, during one of the endless roll calls, she fell to the ground.

She was selected; she was sent with other girls and women to a lineup that lead to the death chambers.

Around her some of the younger girls were begging the guards for mercy: begging them to spare their lives. They would do anything, but please, please save them. Such pleas only begat more abuse and much amusement for the SS guards. Danielle urged the girls to not continue in their futile efforts to live. She urged them to prepare themselves for death and to not give the "bastards" the pleasure of seeing them grovel. Die as Jews, die as young proud women. Let them know they were killing human beings.

Not everyone heard her or followed her lead. But many did and drew courage from her. Within moments the much feared head of the female SS guards appeared before Danielle. She asked if she was Danielle Raphael. Danielle answered proudly and defiantly that this was the case. She thought for a moment that they were preparing her for an especially hard death.

But to her surprise she was ordered out of the line up and away from certain death. She always remembers the way those women who were not taken from the line looked at her. It left her feeling terribly guilty for being granted a reprieve from certain death.. It seemed wrong after her efforts to get these women to face their death that she now was escaping it--and why her; why should she be singled out for mercy?

As it turned out she was saved from death by her mom. Her mom a trained nurse had been put in the camp hospital. Among her many duties was to massage the neck and back of the head female SS officer. This had been going on for many months and given the officer a great amount of pain relief. Danielle's mom got a promise from this woman to bring her daughter to the relative safety of the hospital laundry. She was a hard woman, but a woman of her word.

(She was executed a year after the war for crimes against humanity.)

The laundry facilities in the Camp was a relatively good place to spend your time in Birkenau. There was food, lots of food, and even single beds along with the right to a weekly bath, in privacy. Danielle and her mom spent the last few months of their stay in Birkenau in this facility.

Nearing January, 1945,  the Russian army was only a few miles away from the Camp. Danielle and her mom suspected they would soon be marched out of the Camp towards the West. It was winter and bitterly cold. They started to steal articles of warm clothing and wore these under their prison garb, all of the time, even in the overly heated laundry rooms. Several times they narrowly missed having to do a strip search. But the life of the camp was drawing to a close and the guards were becoming more concerned with their own escape than they were with enforcing prison rules.

Danielle and her mom were lined up one cold day in January and told to start marching towards the West. The guards set a brisk pace and any stragglers were immediately shot. Although tired and cold, each night, they dared not allow themselves the luxury of sleep. Those that fell asleep in the cold nights seldom woke up the next morning. Each night the mom and daughter would hold each other and force each other to keep moving, to keep walking in small circles. How many nights this went on neither could ever remember.

Thousands died on this march from Auschwitz to the West.

Eventually they reached a train station and were loaded into open coal cars, without blankets or food or drink. The guards, even their dogs were supplied with warm blankets and lots of hot food and fortunately lots of alcohol. Late one night, shortly after they crossed the border from Poland to Germany Danielle and her mom jumped off the slowly moving train, while her guards slept off the alcohol they had been drinking all day. They  ran to the nearby bushes. They waited, anxiously, to see if the train would stop. But it kept moving on and they knew they were free!!!

They quickly got out of their prison clothing and began the long walk back to Berlin. They walked along roads that increasingly became crowded with German refugees fleeing to the West, away from the advancing Russians. In the confusion of a country losing a war: They managed to get back to Berlin and from there friends moved them further west to a small town where they waited till the armies of the West arrived. A few months later the advance party of the American Seventh Army arrived and they were liberated.

Of the 1000 people sent to Birkenau as a birthday gift for Hitler only seven people survived including Danielle and her mom.

In time Danielle re married and lived in England, Scotland, Israel, Africa and Canada. Although happily married she never really got over the loss of her first love and especially her darling daughter. In addition to losing those she loved she had also lost her home, her wealth, her nation and her once easy faith in a benevolent God.  She never again felt able to pray to and to expect a God to help her or to make things better. She never again felt completely safe and at home in our world.

Such, briefly, is the story of Danielle Raphael: a woman, a mother, a wife, a Jew, a citizen--a Holocaust survivor: # 51349.

She is my hero.

The Time Bound Can Not Know The Timeless...

A wise teacher, a long time ago, in a place far, far away from this computer terminal summed up life and our existential ignorance of the "deep magic" of G-d. He wrote:

Why do I think God is unknowable? It says so in the Good Book!

Book of Ecclesiastes (3:1-11).

To every thing there is a season
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time:
also he hath set time in their hearts,
so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

Notes From A Fucked Up Yankee Agnostic Jesus Follower...

I may, only, be a fucked up Yankee Agnostic, but...I am also a follower, a disciple, a student of the Teacher or Rabbi from ancient Palestine who told the people around him that all that is needed for salvation--fulfillment, liberation, mindfulness, eternity--is to love God and each other.

Live in the Presence of God and look after each other, including those whom our political mandarins label enemies. See in them the face of God. Spend no time trying to define or own or box and wrap up God.

Simply accept the Presence of God in each of us and in the world. Simply look after each other.

Remember each of us is an image of God. If we fail to see God in the face of our neighbors and our enemies, we will never see God in Christ.

I am a fucked up Yankee Agnostic who practices [mindful] living in the Presence of God and who practices [is mindful about] being a good neighbor.

I am fucked up Yankee Agnostic Follower Of Jesus The Rabbi, The Teacher...

What Is Religion?

Nevertheless, it [religion] is quite simple at bottom. There is nothing really secret or complex about it, no matter what its professors may allege to the contrary... its single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him. That function and that purpose are common to all religions, ancient or modern, savage or civilized, and they are the only common characters that all of them show.

Nothing else is essential.

Religion may repudiate every sort of moral aim or idea, and still be authentically religion. It may confine itself to the welfare of the votary in this world, rejecting immortality and even the concept of the soul, and yet hold its character and its name. It may reduce its practices to hollow formulae, without immediate logical content. It may imagine its gods as beings of unknown and unknowable nature and faculties, or it may imagine them as creatures but slightly different from men. It may identify them with animals, natural forces, or innanimate objects, on the earth or in the vague skies.

It may credit them with virtues which, in man, would be inconceivable, or lay to them vices and weaknesses which, in man, would be unendurable. It may think of them as numerous or solitary, as mortal or immortal. It may elect them and depose them, choose between them, rotate them in office, arrange them in hierarchies, punish them, kill them.

But so long as it believes them to be able at their will to condition the fate of man, whether on this earth or elsewhere, and so long as it professes to be capable of influencing that will to his benefit, that long it is religion, and as truly deserving of the name as the most highly wrought theological system ever heard of.

--H.L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930, revised 1946):

What Can I Know...?

Does the Universe have a beginning? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Is the Universe eternal? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Was the Universe created? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Is the Universe contained in God. Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Is God contained in the Universe? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Is there a God? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

If there is a God what is God? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Monotheism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Christianity? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

If Christianity, which Christianity? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Islam? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

If Islam, which Islam? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Hindooism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Sikhism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Buddhism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

The one true religion? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Abraham? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Jesus? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Mohammhed? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Socrates? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

The Bible? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

The Koran? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Holy Books? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Polytheism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Atheism? Thus far the human race agrees to disagree.

Me? I think I am a fucked up agnostic!!