March 8

March 8 – AM          Page 20, There Is A Solution, Chapter 2

How many times people have said to us:  “I can take it or leave it alone.  Why can’t he?”  “Why don’t you drink like a gentleman or quit?”  “That fellow can’t handle his liquor.”  “Why don’t you try beer and wine?”  “Lay off the hard stuff.”  “His will power must be weak.”  “He could stop if he wanted to.”  “She’s such a sweet girl, I should think he’d stop for her sake.”  “The doctor told him that if he ever drank again it would kill him, but there he is all lit up again.”
Now these are commonplace observations on drinkers which we hear all the time.  Back of them is a world of ignorance and misunderstanding.  We see that these expressions refer to people whose reactions are very different from ours.

March 8 – PM          Page 48-49, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

The prosaic steel girder is a mass of electrons whirling around each other at incredible speed.  These tiny bodies are governed by precise laws, and these laws hold true throughout the material world.  Science tells us so.  We have no reason to doubt it.  When, however, the perfectly logical assumption is suggested that underneath the material world and life as we see it, there is an All Powerful, Guiding, Creative Intelligence, right there our perverse streak comes to the surface and we laboriously set out to convince ourselves it isn’t so.  We read wordy books and indulge in windy arguments, thinking we believe this universe needs no God to explain it.  Were our contentions true, it would follow that life originated out of nothing, means nothing, and proceeds nowhere.
Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God’s ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all.  Rather vain of us, wasn’t it?