COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

I pulled a couple of biographies of Anne Frank off the shelves today, which always gets me in a bit of a black mood. What a phenomenal literary light she was on her way to being! - only to be snuffed out by tyranny at the age of 16. I first read her diaries when I was 10. I don't know if I told you this, but I carried her picture with me when I was overseas, and kept a copy of Tales from the Secret Annex in an aviator's kit bag next to my rack.

Every once in a while, she slips into my dreams like a haunting shadow - a reminder of how fortunate we all are, and how fleeting and precious life is. And when she's on my mind as she has been, for some reason, for the last few days, I'm filled with a sort of restlessness of spirit - as if I must slay some sort of dragon which is beyond my reach. In 2003, I had an outlet. I could slay the dragon of tyrrany, sadism, and oppression in Iraq.

Now I write financial newsletters. Not quite the same manful adrenaline fix.

I remember speaking with the battalion chaplain, in Jordan, one day in the spring of 2003. I was teaching him how to play the pennywhistle, using a hymnal as a guide. The talk turned to theology and our struggle to know God. Basically, I told him what my central problem with Christianity as we know it was, and why I did not consider myself a Christian in the same sense that most people understand the term in the modern era:

I can understand how God can allow evil to happen in this world, because in order for goodness to mean anything, man must retain free will, and with it the capacity to do wrong -- even monstrous wrongs. And I can accept the idea that Christ died for our sins. But if God's mercy is infinite, then Christ could not have died for the Christians alone, but for all of us.

There are two postulates to the ontological proof of the existence of God.

1.) God is that entity nothing beyond which can be concieved, by definition.
2.) A God which exists is greater than a God which doesn't exist.

As a corollary to that idea, I had to believe that if God's mercy only extended to those who had specifically embraced Christ, and others left out, well, I could concieve of a God who's mercy is greater than that. So if (1.) is true, then a God whose mercy embraces only Christians cannot be God, because God must be great beyond conception.

And the example I used, familiar to us both, of someone who possessed a deep-seated grace of spirit dwarfing that of anyone I've ever known, and who was surely deserving of God's infinite grace herself, was Anne Frank. If there was a Hell, she got her quota at Auschwitz and at Bergen Belsen, along with so many others.

I cannot imagine and cannot accept a theology which posits a God who does not embrace all of His children in their suffering. God is greater than that. God is greater than any conception of Him any of us can ever have.