God, that is. We had a very interesting conversation. Where? Where else but the Black Rock desert, where the Divine Essence and I enjoyed a rambling, 10-minute chat on Friday morning. Not metaphysically, but in a phone booth (while Superman waited patiently outside).
I asked if She’d read “The End of Faith,”an enormously provocative and important book by Sam Harris. Indeed She had. (Interestingly, the woman who spoke to God before me described Him as a man.) “The problem isn’t faith,” She said, “but organized religion.” When I wondered why there wasn’t more divine intervention, given the current state of affairs, She replied by answering that age-old question: Yes, we do have free will, and no, there isn’t much She can do about the little foibles, the microcosmic inanities, of creation.
So what of the Bible? The Old Testament is the source of much of the modern world’s conflict and turmoil, and I wanted to know once and for all whether or not it was, in fact, God’s word. When I asked that final question, She laughed with dry amusement: “Come on," She insisted. "I’m a much better writer than that.”
And speaking of free will,
one of the most outrageous examples of national hysteria in memory unfolded on August 12th, at a JetBlue
boarding gate in New York. Raed Jarrar, an architect of Iraqi descent on his way to California, was forced to remove a black T-shirt inscribed with an anti-war slogan — “We Will Not Be Silent” — in Arabic and English. The phrase, ironically, is borrowed from the White Rose group, formed in Munich in 1941. White Rose members believed that the young people of Germany had the potential to overthrow Adolf Hitler and the Nazi government. How’s that for irony?
As fate would have it, I’m scheduled to fly to JFK on JetBlue next month. In a perfect world, every freedom-loving passenger traveling on that airline would pull a Spartacus move, and show up wearing the very same T-shirt. Can you imagine? Two hundred JetBlue passengers, all wearing shirts saying "We Will Not Be Silent" in Arabic and English. Imagine the open mouths of the baggage checkers; the consternation of the ticket-takers; the giddy pride of belonging to a nation of people with the courage to stand up for the First Amendment.
Oh, for a perfect world.